Tuesdays with Gindy Alarm 444

I have a good friend, Lin Hunnicutt.  He and I met when we were both attending the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina.

Lin is visually challenged.  I point this out because that is important to this story.

Lin had signed up for a media arts class in basic recording.  One of his assignments was to edit, rather extensively, a recording.  Back at that time, we did not have anything like Audacity or other editing programs.  We had to break out the razor blades, editing block, and the demagnetizer in order to edit a recording.

Editing a quarter-inch wide tape is difficult for a sighted person.  It would be next to impossible for a blind person to do.  Because of this, Lin’s professor told him he could get help from someone.  I had taken the class before.  Lin asked me to help him.

Lin lived with his grandparents.  They lived very close to the University.  It was decided that Lin, our friend Tommy Branton, and I would stay the night at his grandparents’ house and I would edit the tape.

Lin’s grandparents were out of town that evening, so we guys had the house to ourselves.  We ordered a pizza and I went to work editing this tape.

I don’t remember much about this tape except that it was supposed to be a radio program.  The only thing that really stands out was a spot where a guy said, in a mock Irish accent, “includin’ me clothes.”  We had to have heard that line thousands of times during the course of the evening.

Sometime fairly early in the evening, Tommy Branton, a constant practical joker, excused himself for the evening and went to bed or so we thought.

A quick note about Thomas Edison Branton, Jr.:  Tommy was one of those people who knew a lot of trivia.  He could play Name That Tune with no notes.  Lin is pretty much the same when it comes to an awesome knowledge of music. 

Tommy was also a practical joker of epic proportions. 

Lin and I chatted while we edited.  We discussed the play to which we were listening.  By the time we were done, it seemed that we had the entire play memorized and were going to puke if we ever heard it again.  This is a common thing when one is editing a project.  By the time you have completed the project, you never want to see or hear anything about the project again.

About 3:30 a.m. or so, we finished up.  We had a final edited version of the tape copied, labeled, and ready to be turned in.  Lin went to his bedroom, which was in the basement, and I crashed on a couch in the basement.

I did not see where Lin actually went because he did not turn on any lights.  There was no need to turn on any lights.  We went to sleep.

All of a sudden, I heard an unfamiliar automated voice saying, “Alarm 444” repeatedly.  I also heard Lin thrashing and crashing in his room.  We were both dealing with exhausted minds.  I was in an unfamiliar place and had no idea what was going on.

It seems what had happened was that when Tommy went to bed in the guest room upstairs, he first made a stop downstairs in Lin’s bedroom.  The twerp had rearranged Lin’s bedroom and set his talking alarm clock to 4:44 a.m.  Tommy then hid the alarm clock somewhere in the bedroom.

Lin and I decided to go back to sleep and deal with Tommy in the morning.  We both figured that if we went upstairs at that time we would do Tommy great bodily harm.

The next morning, Tommy got up and left before Lin and I woke up.  Smart move.

We plotted our revenge.  I was more mad that Tommy had rearranged a blind person’s room than that I got woke up from a sound sleep when I was exhausted.

Revenge is the dish that is best served cold.  The Alarm 4:44 episode took place towards the end of the Fall 1983 semester.

We brought my fiancé into the planning.  Suzanne arrived for the Spring 1984 semester and we made plans for a “Special Spring Break Party”.  That party had few guests.  There was Lin, my roommate Barry, Suzanne, me and, of course, Tommy.

I fried chicken in my room in an electric skillet.  Suzanne baked a chocolate cake in her

dorm kitchen.

Barry, dear sneaky Barry, consulted with the pharmacists in training who lived on our floor.  There were two brothers living on the fifth floor of Snowden in the Towers dorm that year.  These brothers were both studying to be pharmacists. Their father, and his father, and so on back for several generations, had been pharmacists.

The brothers checked with the Physicians’ Desk Reference, and consulted their father as well as their pharmacy advisor to see exactly how much Ex-Lax Tommy could tolerate.

I took the recommended dose of Ex-Lax unflavored pills and ground them up into a fine powder.  I mixed this powder into a small amount of water.

We invited Tommy to have a piece of cake, after we had already taken slices.  Tommy did not suspect anything because we were eating the cake and he saw me slice it.  As I was turning to get his piece of cake, I quickly sprinkled the liquid Ex-Lax onto his piece.  He scarfed it down.

The next day started Spring Break and we had to go home for the week.  I got a phone call from Tommy soon after I got home.

You see, Tommy left to drive home just after the party.  For him, home was in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.  This was just over a 100-mile drive that would take approximately 2 hours.

Tommy drove this at night.  Back then, all-night stores were uncommon along the interstate.  There were exactly two places he could stop along the way to use the restroom and Tommy stopped at both of them.

Both Lin and I got similar phone calls.  They went something like this.  “I thought about you at 1 a.m., then again at 2 a.m.  Around 3 a.m., I got over thinking about you and proceeded down the road again.  Not very long after that, I thought about you again. I thought about you from right around 4 a.m. up until around about 9 a.m.  I made it home shortly after that." 

"By the way, you guys owe me a pair of shorts."

As I said, revenge is the dish best served cold.

Tommy was a great guy and a very fun loving person.  He loved to square dance.  Quite a few years ago, Tommy was engaged to be married.  The week before the wedding, Tommy and his fiancé had a square dance to celebrate their upcoming wedding.

Just a week before, Tommy had a physical examination and everything checked out fine.  I heard that Tommy had the time of his life that night.  I was told that night that when the music stopped, Tommy stopped.  He had a heart attack and died.

I don’t think I have a picture of Tommy to share with you.  But now, Tommy is square dancing up in heaven and having a grand old time.

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McClendon Studios Presents: Driving Mrs. Crazy

Happy Birthday Nana

McClendon Studios Presents:
Driving Mrs. Crazy

There are some people in this world who do not make good passengers.  My mother is one of them. No, I do not really think my mother is crazy.  I just thought that the title was a good play on the title Driving Miss Daisy.

When my sister went off to college and I was still in high school, it was normal that my mother and I would drive down and move my sister into her dorm at the beginning of a semester.  When the semester was over, we would move her out.

A side note here is that no one in my family has ever helped me move anywhere.  When I moved in to my trailer in Spartanburg, South Carolina, my friend Phil Brown helped me move in.

My dog, Abby, and I moved all by ourselves from the trailer to the house on Burnett Street in Spartanburg.  My girlfriend and now child-bride Suzanne, along with our friends Roger and Debbie, helped me move out of the Spartanburg house.

At the beginning of one semester, I drove the truck from Iva to Columbia to move my sister into her dorm at the University of South Carolina.  All along the way, my mother had comments about my driving.  “You are following too close.”  Or, “You are braking too hard.”  Finally, I stopped the truck in the middle of the road and asked my mother, “Do you want to drive?”  She responded, “No, you are doing just fine.”

We spent a couple of hours unloading the truck and carrying the crates, refrigerator, television, etc., up the elevator at my sister’s dorm.  Of course, all of this entailed enduring snippy comments from her suitemates and other residents of her floor.  I don’t make a great presentation when I am hot, sweaty, and forced to endure stupid and rude.

My mother and I climbed back in the truck and proceeded to go to my Grandmother Ruby’s house in Johnston, South Carolina.  We were going to move some of her stuff back to our place in Iva because my Grandmother Ruby was moving there.

My mother has a way of making work much harder than it has to be.  Rather than letting a person proceed in a way that makes sense, she attacks it all at one time. 

She started taking things apart and hauling them to the front porch. I had to work around all this clutter to load the truck with the larger, heavier stuff on the bottom.

I finally got the truck loaded with the stuff and everything tied down.  I gave my Grandma Ruby a goodbye hug and off my mother and I went for the longest 76 mile drive ever taken.

The posted speed limit along most of the route was 55 miles per hour.  Every time I would get the truck above 35 miles per hour, my mother would get on to me about driving so fast.

Every time I would try to move the truck away from the center line of the road, my mother would tell me I was getting way too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run off in the ditch.

Due to the slow speed, cars were piling up behind us.  Sometimes one would pass, but not often.  About halfway home, our ever-increasing line of cars was joined by the most welcomed man of the hour, Super Trooper.

Super Trooper lit me up.  That is the rolling blue lights came on and I was pulled over.

Super Trooper had me step out of the truck and to the back of it.  He asked me how much I had to drink that night.  I told him I had not touched a drop, but I would be happy to go to jail for DUI if he would just get me out of there.

Super Trooper then asked if there was something wrong with the truck.  I told him, “Mechanically, the truck is running perfectly.”  He asked me why I was driving so slowly.  I told him that every time I approached 35 miles per hour my mother would yell at me to slow down.

Super Trooper then asked if I was having trouble with the steering.  I told him that the truck had this problem that every time I moved away from the center of the road, this alarm would go off to tell me I was getting too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run us in the ditch. 

Super Trooper said, “I guess that alarm is your mother?”  I told him yes.  I told him I was fully capable of driving the truck home without any intervention from my mother and that the last half hour of the journey had just about driven me crazy.

Super Trooper went to my mother’s door and asked her to step to the rear of the truck.  He told her he was issuing her a warning.  He told her that she was not to tell me to slow down, speed up, or otherwise tell me how to drive.

He further told her that he was going to follow us to the county line to make sure his orders were followed.  He also indicated he would radio ahead to make sure the troopers between where we were and our house were alerted to the situation.

We climbed back in the truck and my mother said, “I’m sorry.”  In fact, she repeated that every time we crossed a county line.  Every time we passed a county line, there was a trooper or deputy somewhere just past it.

We made it home.  We did not lose one single item.  To this day, I have never lost anything off the back of a truck.  It is a source of pride for me. And, to this day, I will not let my mother forget about this little adventure.

What about you?  Do you have a driving story you would like to share with us?

 

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Throwback Thursday. Me, Baseball, and Fire Ants

Throwback Thursday. Me, Baseball, and Fire Ants

As you may have read about in my post Football Helmets and Cleats, my father was always athletic. He was a real man's man, one who went to Newberry College on a football scholarship. 
Me, on the other hand, when it came to sports, I could not care any less about any of them.  
Our friend David Bundy summed it up well when he said watching baseball was about as exciting as watching paint dry.  Playing it was not much more exciting than that for me.
My mother would not hear of me playing football, although the sandlot games we played in the neighborhood were much more dangerous than the team sport itself.
When I was in first and second grade, my parents signed me up to play on a baseball team,the Yankees.  I had no more clue what was going on than if they had signed me up to work in nuclear physics or something similar.  I watched baseball and football on television, but only had a vague idea of what was going on.
From time to time, my father and I would go out in the yard and he would throw the ball to me and I would try to hit it or try to catch it.  Usually, I would catch it with my forehead.
As the years passed slowly by, I became less and less interested in sports.  Then, I was hired by the University of South Carolina to be the locker room guard on game day.  It was my job to keep anyone who did not have a pass out of the locker room.  Period. 
One of the top men from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) tried to get into the locker room without a pass.  I would not let him pass and it irritated him to no end.  He called my captain.  My captain escorted the man into the secured area.  
The next day, I was summoned to headquarters to meet with the man.  I thought, "He is going to fire me."  As it turned out, he thanked me.  He told me that most men would have let him through, but I was right, he did not have a pass.
It was my job to make sure the secure room in the locker room was, in fact, secure.  That is the room where the governor of the state would wait while his detail made sure the way up to his box was secure.  
He and his entourage would wait in the secure room while I stood guard outside the door.  It impressed me that Governor Dick Riley ALWAYS stopped to shake my hand on the way in.  
The football players did not know my name.  They only knew me as "Barney"  I was six foot three inches tall and maybe weighed 160 pounds with all my security gear.  I did not carry a gun, so there was no need to carry my bullet in my pocket.
Everyone compared me to Barney Fife from the Andy Griffith show.  If one of the players needed me, he would call "Barney".
I was a licensed Emergency Medical Technician (EMT).  I took a swimming class there at the University.  Many of the players were in the same class because there was some rule about which PE classes they could take that did not violate NCAA rules.  I have no idea what they were.
In the class, all you had to do to pass was get in the water.  Come to find out, some of these huge guys were afraid of the water, deathly afraid.  
Some of the guys had this game they called Throw Barney in the Pool.  I could swim like a fish and they knew it, so it was no problem.  There was one guy, I will call "Big Guy",who was about twice my size, who did not participate in the game of Throw Barney In the Pool.  He was deathly afraid of the water,.
We had to wear university-issued swim suits into the pool  I was the only one in the class not on the football team.  Most of these guys wore large or extra large.  So, that was all the equipment people distributed.  The large would bag all over the place on me.  
One day, Big Guy, who was deathly afraid of the water, was standing behind me in line

when the equipment manager handed me a large suit.  I asked for a medium and he told me that all he had gotten out were large and extra large. Big Guy behind me spoke up and said, "Give Barney a medium." From that point forward, there was ALWAYS a medium for me. 
A few classes later, the coach told Big Guy he had to get in the water at least once or he would not be eligible to play football.  He was devastated.  I told Big Guy, I am an EMT and an excellent swimmer.  I will walk you in the shallow end of the pool (about four foot deep) and will stay with you.  If anything happens, I will take care of it.  
We walked slowly into the shallow end.  We showed the coach that Big Guy was in the water and he passed the class.  The game Throw Barney in the Pool was never played again.  That year, Big Guy set all types of school records for the defense.  He WAS the defensive line.  He was the backbone of the "Fire Ant Defense."  
He never knew my name.  It was not important.  Barney took care of him. 






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McClendon Studios Presents: My First Trailer.

My First Trailer

In 1980, I graduated from Crescent High School.  I applied to several colleges and, lo and behold, I was accepted by the University of South Carolina in Spartanburg.   The problem was they did not have any dorms.

My family owned several houses and one trailer that we bought to be rent houses.  At the time, most were rented, but before we could rent the trailer it would need to be renovated.

It seems that the woman that owned the trailer had died in the back bedroom. Her son sold the trailer.  It was on a rented lot when we bought it, so we towed the trailer to the large lot we had at one of our other rent houses.  This house was on Lee Street.

Soon after we got the house moved to the new location, my father and one of our store employees, who happened to be an excellent carpenter, went to look over the trailer.

The trailer had not been hooked up to electricity or any other utility yet.  When my father and Author “Ott” went to look over the trailer, it was just about dark.  The sun was setting and it was a little dark inside.

Both my father and Ott were acutely aware that the lady who had owned the trailer had died in the trailer in the back room. 

Both Ott and Papa Bruce were extremely averse to anything what-so-ever to do with death.

There was still some light in the trailer, but not much.  One of them accidently kicked a wire clothes hanger with their foot and it went sailing into the back bedroom where the woman had been found dead.

Independently from one another, both men decided they had a good idea of what needed to be done at the trailer at that time.   Seconds later, both men were looking at one another across the seat of the truck. Both had very wide-open eyeballs.

Ott said to Papa Bruce, “Did you lock the door?”  Papa Bruce responded that there was nothing in the trailer to steal so it did not matter if it was locked or not. To the best of my knowledge, neither man set foot in the trailer again until it was moved to Spartanburg.

A couple of days later, my father ordered a couple of loads of gravel and had it delivered to the Lee Street lot.  He sent me and my brother Daniel to the lot to make a driveway with this gravel. 

I loaded two shovels in the truck and off we went to the lot and I started shoveling gravel as my brother sat on the tailgate of the truck and watched me.  After I had most of the gravel moved to make a driveway for the trailer, I sat down on the tail gate of the truck.  I was still holding the shovel in my hands when I sat down. 

A few minutes into my rest, my brother says to me, “Let me hold your shovel, David.”  He got up and scooped up one shovel of gravel and then my father pulled up in the other truck to check on our progress.

As he pulled up, Daniel dropped his one and only shovel full of gravel back on the pile and approached Papa Bruce in the truck.

Papa Bruce said, “You boys really have gotten a lot of work done for just two people."  He said, "Finish on up, then I have something else for you to do." Papa Bruce left.  Daniel sat back down on the tailgate and I finished the driveway. 

The trailer sat vacant. There were still no interior renovations to it. Then, Papa learned I would need a place to live in Spartanburg and he thought the trailer would be a perfect idea.

Me and some friends of mine cleaned the trailer and fixed things in it.  One thing was that the mirrors in the bathroom had to be replaced, but that is another story.

The trailer had been built in the 1960s.  The back bedroom had very thick, red shag carpet.  There were two pendent lights that hung from the ceiling with faux gold on them.  Some of that was scratched off.

There was a large mirror on either side of the room.  The paneling on the wall was dark and shiny.  There was a bit of white wallpaper on one wall and it had light blue flowers on it. There was a slight pink tint to some of the flowers in the wallpaper.

I decided to go with the flow and decorate this room in as tacky a way as I possibly could.

I bought a velvet-like bedspread with red dingo balls on it.   I also bought orange sheets and yellow curtains.  I was determined to make this room as tacky as possible.   My friend Phil Brown dubbed it the Pimp Room. 

Somehow, word of my effort to make the tackiest room got around and elderly ladies, who you would think did not know what a pimp was, began to approach me at church and at the store and give me tacky items for the room. 

There were green throw pillows and one of those silk hand painted pillows one gets when they go on vacation.  I forget what it said.  

I was given strobe lights and black lights galore. 

I drove to Spartanburg and found Green Acres Trailer Park right across the street from the University.  This was a controlled access road, so it was not like I could walk right across the street to school though. 

I rented the lot and arranged to have my lights, water, and phone set up.  While I was

getting my water arranged for, I met the fire chief at the local volunteer fire department and showed him my EMT credentials and joined the rescue squad right then and there. At that time in Spartanburg, S.C., the fire departments and rescue squads were combined.  The chief’s name was Tom Emery. 

I still remember my very first electric bill.  Back then we called them light bills.   It was from Duke Power Company and was on one of those old time computer punch cards.  The bill was for $1.01. I have never seen one so low again. This was my first piece of mail in Spartanburg. 

Soon I will tell you about my first night in the trailer.  

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Alarm 444

Alarm 444

I have a good friend, Lin Hunnicutt.  He and I met when we were both attending the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina.

Lin is visually challenged.  I point this out because that is important to this story.

Lin had signed up for a media arts class in basic recording. One of his assignments was to edit, rather extensively, a recording.  Back at that time, we did not have anything like Audacity or other editing programs.  We had to break out the razor blades, editing block, and the demagnetizer in order to edit a recording.

Editing a quarter-inch wide tape is difficult for a sighted person.  It would be next to impossible for a blind person to do. Because of this, Lin’s professor told him he could get help from someone. I had taken the class before.  Lin asked me to help him.

Lin lived with his grandparents.  They lived very close to the University.  It was decided that Lin, our friend Tommy Branton, and I would stay the night at his grandparents’ house and I would edit the tape.

Lin’s grandparents were out of town that evening, so we guys had the house to ourselves.  We ordered a pizza and I went to work editing this tape.

I don’t remember much about this tape except that it was supposed to be a radio program.  The only thing that really stands out was a spot where a guy said, in a mock Irish accent, “includin’ me clothes.”  We had to have heard that line thousands of times during the course of the evening.

Sometime fairly early in the evening, Tommy Branton, a constant practical joker, excused himself for the evening and went to bed or so we thought.

A quick note about Thomas Edison Branton, Jr.  Tommy was one of those people who knew a lot of trivia.  He could play Name That Tune with no notes.  Lin is pretty much the same when it comes to an awesome knowledge of music. 

Tommy was also a practical joker of epic proportions. 

Lin and I chatted while we edited.  We discussed the play to which we were listening. By the time we were done, it seemed that we had the entire play memorized and were going to puke if we ever heard it again.  This is a common thing when one is editing a project.  By the time you have completed the project, you never want to see or hear anything about the project again.

About 3:30 AM or so, we finished up.  We had a final edited version of the tape copied, labeled, and ready to be turned in. Lin went to his bedroom, which was in the basement, and I crashed on a couch in the basement.

I did not see where Lin actually went because he did not turn on any lights. There was no need to turn on any lights. We went to sleep.

All of a sudden, I heard an unfamiliar automated voice saying, “Alarm 444” repeatedly.   I also heard Lin thrashing and crashing in his room.  We were both dealing with exhausted minds.  I was in an unfamiliar place and had no idea what was going on.

It seems what had happened was that when Tommy went to bed in the guest room, which was upstairs, he first made a stop downstairs in Lin’s bedroom.  The twerp had rearranged Lin’s bedroom and set his talking alarm clock to 4:44 AM.   Tommy then hid the alarm clock somewhere in the bedroom.

Lin and I decided to go back to sleep and deal with Tommy in the morning.  We both figured that if we went upstairs at that time we would do Tommy great bodily harm.

The next morning, Tommy got up and left before Lin and I woke up.  Smart move.

We plotted our revenge.  I was more mad that Tommy had rearranged a blind person’s room than that I got woke up from a sound sleep when I was exhausted.

Revenge is the dish that is best served cold.  The Alarm 4:44 episode took place towards the end of the Fall 1983 semester.

We brought my fiancé into the planning.   Suzanne arrived for the Spring 1984 semester and we made plans for a “Special Spring Break Party”.  That party had few guests. There was Lin, my roommate Barry, Suzanne, me and, of course, Tommy.

I fried chicken in my room in an electric skillet.  Suzanne baked a chocolate cake in her dorm kitchen.

Barry, dear sneaky Barry, consulted with the pharmacists in training who lived on our floor.  There were two brothers living on the fifth floor of Snowden in the Towers dorm that year. These brothers were both studying to be pharmacists. Their father, and his father, and so on back for several generations had been pharmacists.

The brothers checked with the Physicians’ Desk Reference, and consulted their father as well as their pharmacy advisor to see exactly how much Exlax Tommy could tolerate. ]

I took the recommended dose of Exlax unflavored pills and ground them up into a fine powder.  I mixed this powder into a small amount of water.

We invited Tommy to have a piece of cake, after we had already taken slices.  Tommy did not suspect anything because we were eating the cake and he saw me slice it.  As I was turning to get his piece of cake, I quickly sprinkled the liquid Exlax onto his piece. He scarfed it down.

The next day started Spring Break and we had to go home for the week.  I got a phone call from Tommy soon after I got home.

You see, Tommy left to drive home just after the party.  For him, home was in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.  This was just over a 100 mile drive that would take approximately 2 hours.

Tommy drove this at night.  Back then, all night stores were uncommon along the interstate.  There were exactly two places he could stop along the way to use the restroom and Tommy stopped at both of them.

Both Lin and I got similar phone calls.  They went something like this.  “I thought about you at 1 AM, then again at 2 AM.   Around 3 AM, I got over thinking about you and proceeded down the road again.  Not very long after that, I thought about you again. I thought about you from right around 4AM up until around about 9 AM.  I made it home shortly after that." 

"By the way, you guys owe me a pair of shorts."

As I said, revenge is the dish best served cold.

Tommy was a great guy and a very fun loving person.  He loved to square dance.  Quite a few years ago, Tommy was engaged to be married.  The week before the wedding, Tommy and his fiancé had a square dance to celebrate their upcoming wedding.

Just a week before, Tommy had a physical examination and everything checked out fine. I heard that Tommy had the time of his life that night.  I was told that night that when the music stopped, Tommy stopped.  He had a heart attack and died.

I don’t think I have a picture of Tommy to share with you.   But now, Tommy is square dancing up in heaven and having a grand old time.

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Driving Mrs. Crazy

McClendon Studios Presents:
Driving Mrs. Crazy

There are some people in this world who do not make good passengers.  My mother is one of them. No, I do not really think my mother is crazy.  I just thought that the title was a good play on the title Driving Miss Daisy.

When my sister went off to college and I was still in high school, it was normal that my mother and I would drive down and move my sister into her dorm at the beginning of a semester.  When the semester was over, we would move her out.

A side note here is that no one in my family has ever helped me move anywhere.  When I moved in to my trailer in Spartanburg, South Carolina, my friend Phil Brown helped me move in.

My dog, Abby, and I moved all by ourselves from the trailer to the house on Burnett Street in Spartanburg.  My girlfriend and now child-bride Suzanne, along with our friends Roger and Debbie, helped me move out of the Spartanburg house.

At the beginning of one semester, I drove the truck from Iva to Columbia to move my sister into her dorm at the University of South Carolina.  All along the way, my mother had comments about my driving.  “You are following too close.”  Or, “You are braking too hard.”  Finally, I stopped the truck in the middle of the road and asked my mother, “Do you want to drive?”  She responded, “No, you are doing just fine.”

We spent a couple of hours unloading the truck and carrying the crates, refrigerator, television, etc., up the elevator at my sister’s dorm.  Of course, all of this entailed enduring snippy comments from her suitemates and other residents of her floor.  I don’t make a great presentation when I am hot, sweaty, and forced to endure stupid and rude.

My mother and I climbed back in the truck and proceeded to go to my Grandmother Ruby’s house in Johnston, South Carolina.  We were going to move some of her stuff back to our place in Iva because my Grandmother Ruby was moving there.

My mother has a way of making work much harder than it has to be.  Rather than letting a person proceed in a way that makes sense, she attacks it all at one time. 

She started taking things apart and hauling them to the front porch. I had to work around all this clutter to load the truck with the larger, heavier stuff on the bottom.

I finally got the truck loaded with the stuff and everything tied down.  I gave my Grandma Ruby a goodbye hug and off my mother and I went for the longest 76 mile drive ever taken.

The posted speed limit along most of the route was 55 miles per hour.  Every time I would get the truck above 35 miles per hour, my mother would get on to me about driving so fast.

Every time I would try to move the truck away from the center line of the road, my mother would tell me I was getting way too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run off in the ditch.

Due to the slow speed, cars were piling up behind us.  Sometimes one would pass, but not often.  About halfway home, our ever-increasing line of cars was joined by the most welcomed man of the hour, Super Trooper.

Super Trooper lit me up.  That is the rolling blue lights came on and I was pulled over.

Super Trooper had me step out of the truck and to the back of it.  He asked me how much I had to drink that night.  I told him I had not touched a drop, but I would be happy to go to jail for DUI if he would just get me out of there.

Super Trooper then asked if there was something wrong with the truck.  I told him, “Mechanically, the truck is running perfectly.”  He asked me why I was driving so slowly.  I told him that every time I approached 35 miles per hour my mother would yell at me to slow down.

Super Trooper then asked if I was having trouble with the steering.  I told him that the truck had this problem that every time I moved away from the center of the road, this alarm would go off to tell me I was getting too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run us in the ditch. 

Super Trooper said, “I guess that alarm is your mother?”  I told him yes.  I told him I was fully capable of driving the truck home without any intervention from my mother and that the last half hour of the journey had just about driven me crazy.

Super Trooper went to my mother’s door and asked her to step to the rear of the truck.  He told her he was issuing her a warning.  He told her that she was not to tell me to slow down, speed up, or otherwise tell me how to drive.

He further told her that he was going to follow us to the county line to make sure his orders were followed.  He also indicated he would radio ahead to make sure the troopers between where we were and our house were alerted to the situation.

We climbed back in the truck and my mother said, “I’m sorry.”  In fact, she repeated that every time we crossed a county line.  Every time we passed a county line, there was a trooper or deputy somewhere just past it.

We made it home.  We did not lose one single item.  To this day, I have never lost anything off the back of a truck.  It is a source of pride for me. And, to this day, I will not let my mother forget about this little adventure.

What about you?  Do you have a driving story you would like to share with us?

 

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Almost an Interview with Star Wars Ben Burtt

When I was attending the University of South Carolina in Columbia South Carolina I majored in Media Arts. Part of one of my classes was to put together  edits from a movie. I chose the movie Star Wars. I called Lucas Films and asked to speak to Ben Burtt, the man in charge of the special sound effects for the movie. I recorded the interview.

Meanwhile Tommy Branton and Lin Hunnicutt had ordered pizza from Pizza Express to be delivered to my dorm room. The pizza arrived before they did and the delivery man began to get obnoxious. He was yelling “pizza pizza, pizza in the background and flipping the light switch on and off. He would not leave.

My recording was ruined. All that could be heard on the tape from the point the pizza guy arrived is the pizza guy. That once in a lifetime chance to have a great phone interview will never come again.

The manager of Pizza Express offered me a free pizza. I refused and never ordered from them again.