It’s the middle of August and my guess is that Two A Days started this week.  Maybe they start earlier now, seeing as school starts about a week before it lets out.  But for those systems who still start classes the first week in September, high school Two A Days are probably cranking up.  For those of you who might not know, Two A Days are just that, two practices a day.  Two full, two hour practices.  One starting at 8 o’clock in the morning, the other at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.  Right slap in the middle of the Dog Days.  Two A Days go on right up to the start of school.  If you play or have played high school football, you know that by about halfway through the second week you are praying for school to hurry up and start so that Two A Days will be over.

I never had the honor of serving in the military, and would in no way compare high school football to boot camp, but I would guess that Two A Days are the closest I ever came.  It was four weeks of sheer hell.  The first week started off in gym shorts, t-shirts and helmets.  A lot of calisthenics.  And a lot of running.  Hitting the ground for pushups on fresh rye grass covered with dew at 8 a.m. is something you can only appreciate if you have experienced it.  The coaches would allow us to lay there for a minute or so to allow the dew and the itch to soak into our legs and bellies.  Then we got to do ten pushups.  Or run in place, then hit the ground when the whistle blew and stay there until it blew again.  Then we got to jump up and do it again.  After calisthenics we would run a lap.  Walker High School was on three levels of Georgia clay.  The top level was the school itself and at the back, the tennis courts.  The level below the school and tennis courts was the baseball field and a dirt access road from the parking lot.  The third level, below the baseball field, was the football field.  A lap was around the football field, up The Hill, down the access road, around the baseball field, back down the steps and out to the 50 yard line.  The Hill was a drainage ditch from the access road to the football field, complete with ruts, holes and rocks.  Imagine forty guys running up this thing in cleats and full pads.  If you fell, you would get trampled.  We would run at least three laps per practice, once at the beginning, once somewhere in the middle and once at the end.  The lap at the end of each practice would be followed by ten 20-yard wind sprints.  If you weren’t in shape by the the time Two A Days started, you got in shape in a hurry.  The laps were not just confined to practice in shorts and shirts, either.  They continued on into the second week and beyond when we were in full pads, although they did occur less frequently as we began to get into full contact drills and scrimmages.  Sometimes the coaches would feel compassion for us and allow us to run at least three laps of only The Hill, the access road and back down the steps.

This was a time when it was thought that too much water coupled with hard physical workouts would give you stomach cramps.  So, we were allowed two water breaks per practice and the coaches stood by monitoring our intake.  One year one of the guys read that a healthy dose of Vitamin C was good before a workout, so he drank a quart of orange juice right before the first practice of the year.  Halfway through the first lap he was spewing orange liquid and making roars that would have attracted more than a few dinosaurs, had any been in existence and nearby.  

Then, there were the drills.  The drills were just that, agility and contact drills.  They were usually set up between two or four tires and consisting of two, four or six players.  In the two player drill, each player laid on their back inside the tires, headgear to headgear.  One player had the ball.  When the whistle blew, both players would jump to their feet, turn, and the player with the ball would attempt to run over the other player.  The other player would try and prevent him from doing such.  In the four and six player drill, there would be either two or four down linemen, a linebacker and a ball carrier, again all inside the tires.  When the whistle blew, the down linemen would attempt to open a hole and the ball carrier would then hit the linebacker.  All inside the tires.  No fancy moves allowed.  The premise was to teach agility, blocking and tackling.  There was The Monkey Roll, an agility drill that was a lot of fun and involved no contact.  Then there was Bull In The Ring.  Everyone would get in a circle and be given a number.  One lucky player would be put in the middle.  The coaches would then call a number, and the player with that number would rush the player in the middle and hit him.  The numbers came from all around the ring, quickly.  About every fifth or sixth hit, the players rotated out.  The premise was to teach a player to feel and be aware of incoming contact and to keep his feet moving.  It worked, but the drill, like dodgeball, Red Rover and most everything else, has since been banned.

Somewhere around the end of the second week, the team split up into the varsity and the B-team.  The B-team consisted of ninth and tenth graders, and would play a six game schedule as opposed to a full ten.  During Two A Days, the B-Team would practice separately for an hour and then go up and scrimmage the varsity.  I say scrimmage.  It was more like just being live tackling dummies.

I played football for five years in school, and the hardest I ever got hit was the first scrimmage of my first year of Two A Days.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  They put me out on the left corner and on the very first play ran a sweep right at me.  Terry Ennis was the fullback.  He and the Ricky Bennett were leading the ball carrier.  I squared up to meet them, and Ricky yelled “Watch the corner!”  Terry yelled, “I got him,” and hit me so hard my chinstrap and one shoe flew off.  I literally flew backwards and, I swear, in mid-air I was laughing.  I hit the ground on my butt and skidded along before coming to a stop.  I  found my shoe and knelt down and put it back on.  On his way back to the huddle Terry grabbed my arm and pulled me up just as I finished tying my shoe.  “All right, little man,” he said, “good hit, good hit!”  I was sure he was talking about his hit on me, but he slapped the top of my helmet and my shoulder pad.  I found my chinstrap, buckled back up and took my place at left corner, ready to go again.

And in my opinion, that is the essence of football.  Hit and be hit.  I played with some guys that didn’t want to get hit.  If you don’t want to get hit then you shouldn’t be playing football.  It’s part of the game.  I can’t tell you the number of times guys would come out for football and last one practice.  Some wouldn’t even make it through a whole practice.  Coach would start yelling, “Where’s So and So?”  “Don’t know, Coach.”  So and So had split.  He got hit one good time and decided that was that.  Then at school the next day you’d ask So and So, “What happened to you yesterday?”  “Oh, I’ve got asthma,” So and So would reply.  Yeah, I had noticed that about So and So when he was smoking in the bathroom.  

I believe if a kid wants to play football, he should be allowed to play.  A guy I once knew said, “I wanted to play football, but my mom wouldn’t let me.”  To me, that is just wrong.  My nephew wanted to play in middle school.  His mother wouldn’t let him.  I told her, “You’ve got to give him the opportunity to get knocked on his ass.  Then one of two things will happen.  He’ll either love it or decide it’s not for him.  But he’ll get to decide for himself.  He won’t go through life knowing that he wanted to play but his mother wouldn’t let him.”  She gave in and let him play.  He played one season and said, “I don’t think I’m going to play football next year, Uncle Jimmy,” he said, “Baseball’s more my sport.”  The following spring he went out and made the All Star team as a pitcher.  Have a great week, keep your head up and your feet moving! –J. 

      

The 99th PGA Championship is being played at Quail Hollow, a beautiful golf course in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina.  At one time, I played a lot of golf.  And when I say a lot, I mean a lot.  I watched it.  I studied it.  I played it.  My late wife Marie were members at Lake Spivey Golf Club, and would play there at least once a week.  In those days, I got off work at 2:30 pm.  I would make sure I had all of my chores at home taken care of, and at least three, sometimes five days a week I would leave work and head straight to Spivey to practice, take a lesson or walk nine holes.  I was obsessed.  However, over time, I came to realize that I was never going to be good enough other than to win a few bets.  I shot 80 twice, but never could break that barrier.  I scored a hole-in-one as Sapphire Valley in 2012.  So, while I still love the game, I don’t spend anywhere near the amount of time and money on it as I once did.  That being said, I stood with my wife on the Swilcan Bridge in the eighteenth fairway of The Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland.  I have been to The Mountain Top.

As I said, I used to watch golf pretty much every weekend.  There’s a big problem with professional golf today.  TV golf ratings are plummeting, and the PGA Tour is having a cow because it believes nobody is watching because Tiger Woods isn’t playing anymore.  I don’t think that’s the case at all.  I think it’s because golf is boring.  Granted, the game doesn’t translate well to TV unless you play it.  But I’m talking about professional golf in general.  It’s boring, and the reason is simple.  It’s because there aren’t any characters in golf anymore.  Back in the day, before it was on TV all the time and had it’s own channel, golf was loaded with characters.  Tommy Bolt was nicknamed Terrible Tommy because of his temper and his propensity to throw clubs.  I don’t mean just tossing them back onto the bag and muttering a few F-Bombs.  I mean helicoptering them down the fairway.  Once, after a particularly poor tee shot, Tommy launched his driver into a nearby lake.  Immediately realizing what he had done, he jumped into the lake to find the driver, but a kid had beaten him to it and emerged with the offending club.  Tommy begged the kid to give him the driver back, but the kid was having none of it and ran off, with Tommy in hot pursuit.  Seeing something like that would be the price of admission alone.

Chi-Chi Rodriguez and Lee Trevino were two pros that understood that not only golf, but all of professional sports, is show business.  Chi-Chi would wield his putter like a sword after holing a putt.  Or, he would run up and throw his hat over the hole, then lift the brim up and peek in to make sure the ball was still in the hole.  I read an interview with Chi-Chi once, and he said, “if your clubs are acting up, go out and buy a set of new ones.  Bring them home and take them out of the box in front of your old ones.  Then, put the old clubs in the closet for three months.  I’ll guarantee when you take them out of the closet, they won’t act up anymore.”  He also was asked how he stayed in such great shape.  He said he did a hundred sit ups a day, an hundred pushups and drank two scotches before he went to bed each night because, “alcohol is the only thing bacteria can’t live in.”  I’d love to hear Tiger say something like that about his workouts.  Usually when he’s asked a question like that, he just glares at the commentator.  As a matter of fact when he’s asked anything, he usually just glares at the commentator.  The hilarity is killing me.  Speaking of which, Tiger may have been the greatest golfer of his time, but every time he talks I can’t help but think of that guy in Beverly Hills Cop that told Eddie Murphy, “We’re not going to fall for the banana in the tailpipe.”

Lee Trevino is a legend of golf, and not just because of his major titles and that splay footed, flat, inside to out swing.  He was a true showman who knew how to play to the galleries.  “At the first U.S. Open I played in, I told jokes and nobody laughed,” he once said.  “Then I won the thing.  I came back the next year and told the same jokes and everybody laughed like hell.”  He also is famous for saying, “Pressure?  There ain’t no pressure out here.  This is gravy.  Pressure is standing over a putt for fifty dollars with only five in your pocket.”  He would hustle at the Dallas golf courses by playing the entire round with a quart Dr. Pepper bottle.  He would throw the ball up and hit it like a baseball.  Then he putted with the thin neck.  Try throwing a golf ball up and hitting it with a bottle sometime.  I would hazard a guess you couldn’t even hit it, let alone hustle golfers using conventional equipment.  

Wearing a safari helmet and carrying a hatchet, Lee threw a rubber snake at Jack Nicklaus on the first tee of a playoff at the 1971 U.S. Open.  I’m trying to imagine someone throwing a rubber snake at Tiger Woods today.  He’d probably get ran off of the Tour.

The last true character in golf was John Daly.  The stories about Long John are legion.  You never know what you are going to get with Daly, and that’s what makes him so much fun to watch.  He may shoot a 65, or dunk five balls in the water on the way to an 18 on a par 5.  A self taught genius, he drank a lot, played the guitar, smoked like a fiend, hit drives off of the tops of beer cans and tees in the mouth of trusting TV commentators lying on the ground.  Completely impatient, in disgust he slapped balls back onto greens while they were still moving, said exactly what was on his mind to the press and gambled away millions.  Every spring during Masters Week, he sets up tent in the parking lot of Hooters on Washington Road down the street from Augusta National, hawking souvenirs and signing autographs.  Now THAT’S a character!  He also possesses a brilliant short game and has won two Majors and eighteen times as a professional.    

The players today are all like cookie cutters.  Since the Tour is all exempt now, there are no Monday qualifiers.  So nobody has to finish a tournament and drive all night to the next stop and tee it up with no sleep and try to play their way into the tournament.  Nobody sleeps in their cars or in bunkers.  I read an article once on this particular subject, and an anonymous pro said, “These guys out here are completely coddled.  Most of them can’t get out of bed in the morning, tie their shoes, take a pee and go to the range without first calling their swing coach, sports psychiatrist and agent.  There’s a lot of people getting rich off of these guys.”  And it’s true.  Trevino said of swing coaches, “When I find one of them that can beat me, then I’ll listen.”  Too bad Tiger didn’t take that approach.

Nobody works on their own equipment anymore.  Greg Norman played with a sand wedge he’d had since he was sixteen, and would bend it to different degrees as needed.  Same with Arnold Palmer.  Arnie would grip his own clubs and grind his own irons and as he saw fit.  Nowadays, equipment trucks follow the tour and if a player breaks, bends or just doesn’t get along with a club, he goes to the equipment trailer and they give him another one.  They all have sponsors, from equipment to apparel, automobiles to financial institutions, sports drinks to golf equipment and on and on.  The days of players having to barnstorm in the off season and play exhibitions, open new golf courses or work out of a club as a Touring Pro are over.  Their agents wouldn’t let them, anyway.  Not enough money.  Besides, a player can play for five or six years making cuts and finishing in the middle of the pack and be set for the rest of his and his kid’s lives. 

But, I will continue to watch.  I’ll check the leader boards on Monday morning and see who won.  Master’s Week will always be a National Holiday, as far as I am concerned.  And, I’ll continue to tee it up.  I’ll bust my little 250 yard drives from the Senior Tees.  Then, I’ll climb in my cart and take off to try and find where it landed… Still Cruisin’!  –J. 

Well, here we are slap in the middle of the Dog Days of Summer.  The Doldrums, if you will.  In other words, it’s hot.  Atlanta finally cracked 95° for the first time this year which, seeing as it took until July 20th to do so, could be considered a mild summer so far.  Time to crank up the A/C.  But what if you don’t have any A/C?  Believe it or not, there are places in  the South where buildings, residences and automobiles are not equipped with A/C.  Hard to conceive, right?  But, as Paul Harvey said, “It’s true!”  Last week the A/C went out in the plant at work (yes, I have a day job…).  You would have thought the world was coming to an end.  The building is an old building and things happen.  And when the air goes down it is a major problem, due to all the computer equipment.  But let’s be honest, we have become so conditioned to the comforts of Carrier that whenever the system goes on the fritz, so do we.  People were on the verge of falling out, losing their minds or just plain melting in the swelter of a fifty year old printing plant with a busted thermostat.  

Now, I realize that I am going to sound like Dana Carvey doing his Grumpy Old Man routine (“that’s the way it was, and that’s the way we had it, and we liked it!”), but I grew up in a time in Georgia when houses, cars, schools and businesses were built without air conditioning.  Hard to fathom these days, isn’t it?  But that’s the way it was, and there are a million plus Boomers out there who will vouch for it.  My high school, Walker High, was the first school built in DeKalb County that had air conditioning.  Columbia High was built soon after Walker and was the first school in the county to have an indoor Olympic sized swimming pool.  Columbia got the better end of the deal.  The air conditioning units at WHS were located in each classroom and were largely non functional.  By the time I enrolled there in 1968, about all they were good for was for juvenile delinquents to stuff paper wads in them and watch them blow up in the air.

The house I grew up in was built in the mid-Fifties and had no built in air conditioning system.  Nor did any of the houses in my neighborhood and beyond.  A smattering had window units, but those don’t count and we will discuss those later.  Our house had an attic fan, as did many of the other homes of the era.  They worked by opening the windows in the morning and evening, and the fan would draw cool air through the windows and blow the warm air out of a vent in the attic.  We also had window fans, and falling asleep at night to the drone of the fans is a memory that is forever etched in my psyche.  Our furnace had one large vent in the middle of the hall.  I remember standing on it on winter mornings in my socks to warm my feet before putting on my shoes, then wrapping up in my sweater and coat and riding my bike to school.

Thank goodness for Clifton Springs, the community swimming hole.  Nobody, and I repeat, nobody in my neighborhood or beyond had a swimming pool in their back yard.  I only recall one.  The Ware sisters, Gail and Jane, had one in their back yard on Clifton Springs Manor.  So, how would those of us without the luxury of a backyard abyss cool off in the summer?  We would play in the sprinkler.  Yes, the sprinkler.  The oscillating kind were the best.  We would put on our swim trunks and play for hours in the sprinkler, just like the kids in the attached video.  It was fun and to us it was just like going swimming.  I can only imagine suggesting to my grandkids today that they go play in the sprinkler.  They would look up at me from their iPads like I had aliens crawling out of my nose.

My parents bought a brand new Ford Fairlane in 1965.  A Sport Coupe, three on the tree.  Fully loaded.  A 289 V-8, three on the tree, leather bucket seats, console, AM radio and no A/C.  A/C was not standard equipment back then and what was sold as a factory installed option wasn’t factory installed at all.  It was an under the dash unit that was installed at the dealership after the car was delivered.  My ’69 Mach 1 had such a unit.  It didn’t work.  At all.  So, I took the unit out from under the dash, the dead compressor out from under the hood and chucked them both.  Suddenly there was more leg room under the dash and arm room under the hood.  Wah-lah…

I told Jackie’s grandson Gavin last week that when I was growing up our car had a Four-55 Air Conditioning System.  “What’s that?” he asked.  “Four windows down at 55 miles per hour,” I said.  “Are you serious???” he asked incredulously.  Yes I’m serious, and I remember going out to Dallas for the summer and it was beyond comprehension that all of the houses out there had central air.  And the cars had air conditioning as well.  And, speaking of Dallas, don’t ever let anybody tell you that’s a “dry heat.”  I remember being out there and for two weeks straight it was 105° and 100% humidity.  That makes Georgia feel like Bah Hah Bah, Maine.  I knew a guy whose in-laws lived in Tucson, Arizona.  He and his wife went out to visit them.  It hit 115° and stayed there the whole time they were there.  He said nobody went outside during the middle of the day, everyone stayed in their houses.  You know why?  Because 115° is 115° any way you slice it, even if it is a “dry heat.”   

Back to the window units.  As I said, a few of the houses in my neighborhood had them.  They were usually located in the parents bedroom.  We finally got a window unit in our house in 1967 when I was twelve years old.  It was in the dining room.  After running full blast for about twelve hours it would eventually cool down most of the house.  Our next door neighbors, the Carnes, had central air conditioning installed in their house.  This was a huge deal in the neighborhood.  I remember walking over to their house with my parents and Mr. and Mrs. Carnes proudly showing us the thermostat and the vents before taking us out in the back yard and showing us the unit.  It was fascinating to reach down and actually feel cool air blowing out of the vents.

My friends Tommie and Nan Ennis moved from Gresham Park to Cedar Grove in 1973.  Their new house was a large split level with central air installed.  Tommie wouldn’t run the air because it cost too much.  So they installed a window unit, not surprisingly, in their bedroom.  Keep in mind they had five kids, four bedrooms, two baths, a living room, a den, a kitchen, two cats, a dog and a deck.  Their daughter Stacey told me that the kids would line up in their parents bedroom and get dressed for school because they would be wringing wet by the time they got dressed anywhere else in the house.

I do not think it is because we Boomers are aging that we cannot handle the heat.  Our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents spent their twilight years without the luxury of air conditioning.  And yes, it is a luxury.  It really is not a necessity, although today you cannot convince most people of that.  I think we have all become so conditioned to cool air blowing out of the vent in the wall that when something happens and it doesn’t work, we have a literal meltdown.  If the A/C goes out in our car, we spend hundreds or thousands having it fixed.  And I am guilty as charged.  A few years back I inherited Jackie’s 2000 Beetle.  The A/C did not work, and it was going to cost four figures to have it fixed.  “Forget that,” I scoffed, “I’ll just roll down the windows.”  The first day I drove it to work the temperature hit what felt like 150° in the shade.  I got stuck in Atlanta traffic on the way home to Conyers from Smyrna.  About halfway there, I called Conyers Imports and informed Lee I would be bringing the car by the next day and having the A/C fixed.  Lee fixed it and I gladly gave him four figures.  Then I climbed in the car, rolled up the windows, cranked down the temp and headed happily to the house.  Dry, cool, calm and collected… Still Cruisin’! –J.

I have been off the grid for a while.  Jackie and I covered quite a bit of land and sea in the space of two weeks.  We traveled from Atlanta to Newark, from Newark to Bar Harbor (Bah Hah Bah), Maine, from Bah Hah Bah to Halifax, Nova Scotia, from Halifax back to Newark, from Newark to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Panama City and finally, from Panama City back to Atlanta.  Whew!  The trip seems twice as long when written out.  We were on a cruise ship the first leg, from Newark to Bah Hah Bah and Halifax.  And yes, I was completely off the grid.  I intended to turn my phone off completely, which I did, then realized on the shuttle from the parking lot to the airport that I had left it in the van.  

There is something completely liberating about being totally off the grid.  No phone, no lights, no motorcars.  Well, maybe not that stark on a cruise ship, but you get the picture.  This was our birthday trip.  Our first day at sea was on my birthday, June 26th.  The return day at sea was Jackie’s, June 30th.  We had a great time, especially in Bah Hah Bah.  We got off the ship at about 7:15 am and spent the day exploring the wonderful little seaside New England town.  My friend Jules, a native of Maine, had advised us that the mornings and evenings were cool, even in the middle of the summer.  And she was right, too.  It was in the 50’s in the morning, pretty chilly.  It may have cracked 80 in the early afternoon, but the temperature was already starting to drop when we headed back to the ship around 5:00 pm.  We sailed from Bah Hah Bah to Halifax.  Quite honestly, there isn’t much to tell about Halifax except for a 3 hour bus ride, less than an hour in Peggy’s Cove, and an obnoxious tour guide in a kilt.

Upon returning on Saturday, we received a call from Jackie’s son Lars, daughter-in-law Carrie and grandson Gavin.  They were in Panama City and invited us down for the Fourth.  So, Sunday morning we rearranged our bags for a trip to the beach and headed down I-85 South.  Along the way, Lars called and asked if I would be interested in going out fishing on Monday.  Hey, twist my arm.  I figured there were worse ways to spend a Monday afternoon.  We had a great day, the fish were biting, and the stringer Carrie and I are holding in the picture above is just one of the two we brought home.  Her dad cooked them that evening in an iron skillet over a camp stove on the tailgate of his pickup.  You can’t get any fresher seafood than that…

On Tuesday, the Fourth, we paddled up Holmes Creek in Vernon, Florida.  Yes, paddled.  We weren’t in the SS Minnow, on a pontoon boat or in a ski boat.  Jackie and I were in a canoe.  And not just any canoe.  A canoe that Carrie’s dad has owned since he was twelve years old.  Jackie said it looked like a submarine from The Great War.  There were specific instructions not to let anything happen to the canoe.  And they put the two of us in it.  Lars, Carrie, Gavin and the others were in kayaks.  Holmes Creek is a wide, shady fresh water creek winding through the Panhandle with a spur that ends at Cypress Spring.  Cypress Spring is absolutely beautiful.  It is pictured here.  The water is crystal clear and very shallow to the spring itself, which is about thirty feet deep.  The deep blue water of the spring is so clear you can see the bottom.   

I had not been in a canoe since 1983.  My father had bought one when we bought our property on Fairfield Lake.  It didn’t even have seats in it, you had to kneel.  I liked it so much, I threw it in as part of the deal when I bought my VW convertible.  Jackie had not been in one since sometime in the Nineties.  She got in one with her Dad, and he kept rocking it trying to scare the daylights out of her.  He succeeded.  So here we are, two people whose river experience was limited to going down the Chattahoochee in an inner tube and a Ramblin’ Raft Race float, canoeing down a creek as big as a river covered with downed trees and various other obstacles.  I pointed out to Jackie that I had earned a canoeing merit badge in the Boy Scouts.  I don’t think it eased her mind any.  It certainly didn’t ease mine.  I swear at one point I heard banjo music.

We negotiated the first obstacle fine, a small tree lying across the creek with passage against one bank.  No problem, nothing to this, right?  Yeah, right.  A little bit further up we got turned sideways and stuck nose first on the bank.  Lars had to come rescue us.  That was mere child’s play compared to what happened next…

We came upon a large tree lying across the creek which the top and limbs had been cut off to allow passage.  I don’t know why they didn’t cut the rest of the stupid thing up, but that’s beside the point.  Lars and Derrick, Carrie’s burly cousin, instructed us to go to the left around the tree.  We tried, but instead hit it headlong and were pushed sideways against the tree by the current.  Lars and Derrick paddled up to help, and suddenly the canoe pitched left at about a thirty degree angle with the edge inches from the water.  Lars and Derrick both grabbed hold of the side of the canoe and I was pushing against the tree with all I had.  My head was stuck under the stump of a limb that had been cut off, and Derrick said, “I know it might be hard because of the tree, but scoot as far to the right on the seat as you can.”  I managed to do so.  Jackie moved to the right as well and somehow, I don’t know how but somehow, the canoe righted and with a big push we got free and around the tree.  Did I mention the cooler and the food were in the canoe as well?

Shaken but undaunted, Jackie and I continued our journey with Lars towing us on a rope from his kayak and we made it to the spring safe and sound. We both paddled around the spring in the kayaks, and became somewhat more familiar with steerage of an open faced manually propelled water vessel.  We did require help getting back in the canoe for the return trip, however, and one kind hearted lady walked us back to the deep water of the creek and pointed us in the right direction.  

We did much better on the return trip, except when we hit a motorized jon boat.  Technically, he had the motor, so he hit us.  And he really didn’t hit us, he pushed us off in the right direction before contact.  He was very gracious.  I think it was obvious we really didn’t know what we were doing.  When we got to the landing there was a line of boats waiting to put out.  So, as we waited across the creek for our turn, one of the good samaritans who had helped us back in the canoe at the spring rode up and said, “Hey, you made it and didn’t turn over!”  “Don’t be so sure, we’re not on dry land yet,” I replied.  We all laughed, but it turned out to be prophetic.  When our turn came, we paddled across the creek, got sideways, had to be pulled up to the landing and almost capsized getting out of the canoe.  But we had made it.  I’m sure Lars and Carrie let out a huge sigh of relief seeing the canoe upright, intact and the top side dry.  I know I did.  Jackie now wants to go to Hard Labor Creek State Park and take kayak lessons… Still Cruisin’!  –J.     

Last Saturday was Graduation Day for many of the high schools around the country.  Today, I’m going back to 1973.  June 6, 1973, to be exact.  Graduation Day for the DeKalb County Board of Education.  For roughly 275 of us at Walker High School, it was the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.  My friend Melanie Bagley posted a copy of the cover of our Commencement Exercises Program earlier this week.  I remember it well.

My parents were building a house in Clayton County, and while the house was being built we had moved from Gresham Park to Spanish Trace Apartments on Flat Shoals Road.  For an eighteen year old boy, moving into a predominately singles apartment complex with two pools and a clubhouse was like moving to Heaven.  The last two weeks of school for the Seniors was a breeze.  We would show up for Baccalaureate and Graduation rehearsals, take any tests or exams that needed to be taken, and then were pretty much free to go.  That meant, for my friends and I, hitting the pool at Spanish Trace.

For graduation, we walked in pairs alphabetically.  However, due to a glitch in the grading system that was entirely my fault, I was left out of the original lineup.  The glitch was cleared up, but the lineups were already set.  One of the guys in the “B” section had graduated early and decided not to walk.  So, I was inserted into his place, walking next to Tony Bailey and in front of Melanie and Randy Bagley.  After the Graduation Exercises had concluded and we were all officially alumni, a group of us guys piled into Doug Holmes’ SS396 Chevelle, went to The Pumphouse in old Underground Atlanta, and drank “several” pitchers of beer.  Back in our time, Graduation was on the last day of school, which in 1973 was on a Wednesday.  This was because of make up days due to the infamous ’73 Ice Storm.  Hence, we all had to be at work or, in Doug’s case, a job interview the next morning.  I was working for the DeKalb Board of Education as a Custodial Engineer.  Meaning, I was on a crew that went around cleaning schools, mostly stripping and waxing floors.  It was part time at night, but kicked in to full time the day after Graduation.

I worked on the crew with a bunch of guys who went to Shamrock High.  I remember walking into the Service Center for work the morning after Graduation.  I was a little fuzzy, but one of the Shamrock guys, Jeff Moore, was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall.  He had his head in his arms, which were crossed around his knees.  He lifted his head when I walked in and weakly said, “Hey, Jimmy.”  He looked like he had been run over by a truck, his eyes resembling a Tennessee road map.  I asked him what happened and he mumbled something about a Graduation party and two in the morning, then buried his head back in his arms.

We were working at an elementary school in Clarkston that week, and when we got there, our first order of business was emptying the trash cans.  On our first trip to the dumpster, Jeff got one whiff of it, shook his head, staggered off and tossed.  He then stumbled back into the school.  We went back inside and were working when a teacher showed up with Jeff, whose face by this time was a mixture of red and green.  “He was in the bathroom,” she said to Mr. Peel, our boss.  “He’s sick.”  She was genuinely concerned, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that he was hung over like a dime store Indian.  She took him into the infirmary and put him on one of those fold up cots.  The remainder of the morning, we would walk by and all we could see was his feet hanging off the edge of the cot.  Poor Jeff had come to a sorry pass…

We woke Jeff up at lunchtime and went to eat at Dairy Queen.  Mr. Peel, a Navy man who apparently had experience in such matters, tried to get him to eat a hamburger and drink a vanilla shake.  The milkshake, he explained, would coat his stomach and the grease in the hamburger would soak up the alcohol.  Jeff took a nibble of the burger and a sip of the milkshake, shook his head and pushed them away.  After lunch, Mr. Peel dropped us all off back at the the school, then took Jeff back to the Service Center and sent him home.  The next day Jeff showed up at work, fresh as a daisy and ready to go.  “I felt better after I went home and got some sleep,” he said, ” I went swimming later on in the afternoon.”  The human body is an amazing thing.

When my daughter Dana graduated from Georgia State University in 2006, she told her mother and I that she wasn’t going to walk in the Graduation Exercises.  “It’s crazy,” she said.  “It’s two hundred and fifty dollars for the cap and gown alone.  And there are about a three hundred of us graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, so we don’t even walk.  They just tell all of those graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree to stand.  We stand and then sit back down.  They don’t even call our names.  And, they give you a rolled up piece of blank paper then mail your degree to you later.  Take that money and throw me a big party.  I want a luau.”  Never ones to shy away from hosting a social gathering, we complied.  And it was a grand party, indeed.  One of Marie’s friends in the printing industry, Larry, ran a catering business on the side.  Larry and his partner would bring a whole pig to your party, cook it, provide all of the side dishes and do all of the clean up.  It was also very expensive, so Marie struck a deal with him.  Larry cooked the pig, and the morning of the party Marie met him at the intersection of I-285 and Bouldercrest Road.  She picked up the pig, brought him home and we placed him on the dining room table, right in the middle of everything.  We then surrounded him with fruit and veggies, and placed the various side dishes around the table.

Of course, my buddy Barry and I had to take it a step further.  We put a pair of cheap sunglasses on the pig, a lei around his neck, stuck an apple in his mouth and named him “Snuffles.”  My Aunt Louise walked in the house, took one look at Snuffles and freaked out.  She wouldn’t even go into the dining room because he was in there.  Nor would she go out onto the deck because, in order to get there, you had to walk through the dining room.  She sat in the front room the entire party with her back to Snuffles and would not even look at him, let alone eat any of him.  I’m sure that if it weren’t Dana’s Graduation party she would have left immediately.  And, of course, my Uncle Tub had to take it a step further by snapping off one of poor Snuffles’ ears and eating it in front of her.  My nephew Jason’s girlfriend at the time was not particularly pleased about a whole pig being on the dining room table either, but she wasn’t as freaked out as Aunt Louise.  I’ve got pictures of Snuffles somewhere in either the albums or the archives.  I’ll have to dig them up and post them.  Snuffles, stretched out on the table, sporting his shades and lei, eating an apple, a real party animal… Still Cruisin’!  –J.  

The only thing I ask of you all is please do not laugh and point at me.  I am a serious artist, and I realize that this is a step outside of the box.  This is not digital art, nor a car portrait, a dog, a cat, a bird, a flower or a still life.  This is a re-creation of the first thing I ever remember drawing.  

I was four years old when I drew the original picture.  I know I was four years old because I remember showing it to my mother when we lived in our house in East Atlanta.  We moved from East Atlanta to Gresham Park in December of 1959 when I was four.  Four and a half in kid years, to be exact.  The original was done on paper in crayon, I’m sure.  This re-creation is acrylic on canvas.  I’m also fairly certain that the worm wasn’t in the original, and I think that the leaf rotors may have been turning.  I do remember that the reflection on the apple was there, made to look like a window.  I also remember that when I showed it to Momma, her daughter said to me, “There’s no such thing as an apple helicopter.”  Momma shushed her, thus quashing my first negative critique.

At the behest of the CEO of Still Cruisin’ Automotive Portraits and AquaHue Artworks, I have been… well, “urged” to post this painting and to write about it.  Not wanting to get fired or be subjected to “positive counseling,” I have complied.

I have been told that I have a very good memory.  That may be true, but a friend of mine said last week that she went upstairs to get her shoes, rearranged the bookshelf and then came back down without the shoes.  That is the story of my life.  I can remember what I wore to school on April 14, 1971, I just can’t remember where I put my car keys five minutes ago.  Or what day it is.  Or why I walked into a room.  But I do remember drawing this picture as a kid.  Jackie once asked me if I remembered my trip down the birth canal.  I told her that I actually did, and that it was kind of like one of those water slides at Lake Lanier Islands where you go down the tube before flying out and landing in a pool of water. 

I had memory issues as a child as well.  I could memorize and recite entire Bill Cosby albums verbatim.  But I couldn’t remember my homework.  My mother used to ask me how I could remember Bill Cosby but couldn’t remember my math homework.  Well, math wasn’t funny.  You couldn’t make the entire class laugh by standing at the blackboard doing mathematical equations…

Kidding aside, I realize that I am blessed with a very good memory.  I am thankful that I am able to remember a number of the details about growing up in Gresham Park, and that I am able to share those memories with those who were there with me in that wonderful place and time.  I used to get in trouble a lot in school for, among other things, drawing in class.  There were really not that many creative outlets in grammar school at that time.  We went to art class once a week.  Same with music class.  Same with the trip to the library.  My imagination would take over and WWII fighter planes, ships, super heroes, motorcycles and dragsters were much more interesting to me than long division.  To this day I really can’t do long division.  Thank goodness for calculators.

My friend, Butch, and I drew comic strips all the time in grammar school.  He did “The How Come Dept.” and I did “Grin and Laugh At It.”  Butch was apparently able to channel his attention span, however.  He made all A’s, graduated from Georgia Tech and became an architect.  I kicked around before landing at DeKalb Technical College and earning a diploma in Commercial Art.  While I was at DeKalb Tech, one of the required classes was Business Math.  It was practical math and we were allowed to use a calculator.  I made an A in the class.  I remember getting the report cards in the mail and running down the driveway yelling, “Momma!  Momma!  I got an A in math!  I got an A in math!!!!”  I had never gotten anything above a C in math my entire life.  Momma cried.  I went out and had a pitcher of dark beer to celebrate.

In the tenth grade I took Geometry, for some reason.  Try as I might, I just could not grasp it.  I think the teacher, Miss Jackson, gave me a D out of the goodness of her heart.  Which is funny, because I use geometry all the time now in my day job and in my art.  But it is applied geometry, not abstract geometry with theorems, isosceles triangles, negative reciprocals and other such jabberwocky. 

After graduating DeKalb Tech, I went to work for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, then got into Macintosh computers and graphic design.  I learned Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Quark XPress, all the programs.  I became obsessed with the computer and quit conventional drawing and painting altogether for about fifteen years, concentrating instead on digital art and design.  However, I never really forgot about the pencils and the brushes.  Art was always such a big part of my life.  I suppose that’s why The Good Lord put me on the planet.   I started painting again in 2006 and will continue to do so for the remainder of my trips around the sun.  Often times, painting from inspiration.  Other times, painting from imagination.  And sometimes… painting from memory!  Still Cruisin’! –J.

Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms everywhere!  I hope you all have a day filled with love, family and happiness.  And, in honor of Mother’s Day and moms, I’d like to feature some of the rides of moms I have known…  

The first car I remember, my Momma’s car, was a turquoise and white 1959 Ford Galaxie.  It was a police interceptor my father bought from one of the firemen he worked with, and was as big as a yacht.  It had an automatic transmission back when automatic transmissions were the exception rather than the rule.  Years later my father told me it had a 352 V8 that, being an interceptor, was not your everyday off the line 352.  He said he got it up to 120 mph once and it got there pretty quick.  I can assure you my mother was not in the car.  If Daddy got over 60 mph, she would start having heart palpitations, flailing her arms, stomping on the imaginary brake with her right foot, screaming and, on some rare occasions, cursing.  She was from Dallas, Texas and at least once a year we would drive out there.  I don’t know if you’ve ever driven from Atlanta to Dallas at 60 mph, but it’s not a trip, it’s a career.  I think I actually went through puberty on one trip.  It wasn’t until I was an adult and drove her home after my grandmother’s funeral that I fully understood what my father went through on those trips.  All I will say is that he was a stronger man than I.

One day when I was about eighteen or nineteen, I picked my mother up from work, which was close to our house. We were sitting at the red light at Highway 42 and Rex Road in my black ’69 Mach 1.  When the light turned green, something came over me.  I stomped the gas and dumped the clutch.  The car sat still for a couple of seconds boiling the tires, then took off down the road burning rubber with an ear piercing scream.  Momma was beating me on the arm and hollering at me to “SLOW THIS DAMN THING DOWN!!!!,” which for her was very strong language.  I hit second gear and the tires barked again, the four barrel carb growling and the glass packs roaring.  About a mile down the road I slowed down and we rode home in silence.  I think she was in shock and unable to speak.  When we got home she got out of the car, slammed the door and stomped unsteadily into the house in a huff.  About a half an hour later, she came into my room.  She had regained her composure and could now talk.  She told me she wasn’t going to tell my Daddy, but hoped I didn’t drive like that anymore because I could get a ticket, lose my license and Mr. Jones would have to cancel my insurance.  I apologized, gave her a hug, and assured her that I would never drive like that again with her in the car.     

My grandmother on my mother’s side learned to drive at eighty years old in a 1967 Rambler American after my grandfather passed away.  My grandmother on my father’s side, Mema, did not drive.  But, my Pepa drove a blue ’57 Bel Air.  Mema always rode in the back and let me ride shotgun.  I loved my Mema and I still do, and not just because she let me ride shotgun.  Looking back, she probably let me ride up front because behind the wheel of a car, Pepa would scare the hell out of the devil himself.  

My Aunt Louise drove a pink and white Buick Special, a car I would love to have today, then graduated to a gold Chevy station wagon.  About five years before she died, she walked into Heritage Cadillac and paid cash for a brand new CTS.  My Aunt Barbara in Dallas had a Chevy station wagon in the Sixties before graduating to a Cadillac as well.  Aunt Lottie drove a Buick Riviera in the Seventies and let me drive it on a date when I was seventeen.  I felt like a king and made sure we rode through McDonald’s and Dairy Queen so everyone could see us.

A lot of my friends mom’s drove cool cars and awesome cruising vessels as well.  Tommy McMillan’s mom had a beautiful dark blue ’66 Mustang with a white vinyl top.  Pat Sconiers’ mom, Joyce, drove a dark green ’72 Mercury Marquis Brougham that was the size of a football field.  My boyhood friend Andy Shook’s mom had a blue ’65 Galaxie, preceded by a blue Falcon station wagon.  Mrs. Shook liked blue.  Jackie’s mom drove a Cadillac, as did Cissy Blalock’s mom.  There were a lot of Cadillacs around.  There were more, but four are enough for the blog…

Debbie Moore’s mom drove a white ’66 T-Bird, which Debbie inherited and drove as a teenager at WHS.  My Aunt Ann had a beautiful 1969 Chevy Caprice, which was the first car I remember seeing with power steering.  My buddy Chip Hunt’s mom had a silver 1970 Impala which we drove to prom, double dating our junior and senior years.  Those were the days before you rented a limo for prom.  In the Impala, we thought we were in a limo.  A lot of our friends doubled up for prom squeezed into Opels and VWs.

My lifelong friend Nan Ennis, Stacey and Dennis’s mom, drove a silver 1968 Dodge Dart Fastback.  It had a slant six engine in it that I don’t believe you could have torn up if you ran battery acid through it and attacked it with a sledge hammer.  She let us drive it all the time.  After the Dart she drove an endless succession of VWs that were bought and sold by her husband Tommie, including the family’s nineteen seventy something model blue and white bus.  For her birthday a few years back I gave Nan a 1/32 scale diecast VW model.  Afterwards, she sent me a card thanking me and added “that damn VW wouldn’t start again!”

None of my friends’ moms rode a motorcycle.  Times were different back then.  Moms didn’t ride motorcycles.  Not on the front, anyway.  A lot of moms drove pony cars and sports cars, though.  I have already mentioned Tommy McMillan’s mom’s Mustang.  Don, Bobby, Darrell and Wanda Campbell’s mom drove a yellow ’69 Camaro with a black vinyl top and a stick shift.  Jan Stowe’s mom, Dale, drove a ’66 Sunbeam Alpine which eventually became Jan’s.  But, the all time prize winner was Doug and Deborah Holmes’ mom, Barbara.  She drove a ’78 Silver Anniversary Edition Corvette.  Now, THAT’S a cool mom!  

Speaking of sporty cars, my friend Dennis Bryant’s dad bought an Army surplus Jeep back in the Sixties to take to the family farm in Greensboro, Georgia and use for deer hunting.  He painted it red.  The Jeep needed a new top, so he asked Mrs. Bryant to take the Jeep to the upholstery shop.  Mrs. Bryant, by the way, was a vivacious and gregarious German woman with a beautiful smile and a rich, wonderful accent.  She introduced me to wiener schnitzel and German potato salad at a very young age.  When she brought the Jeep home from the upholstery shop, it had a white vinyl top with red fringe all around.  I remember Mr. Bryant bringing it over to our house and saying, “Now, won’t I look like a dern dude riding this thing out to the woods to go hunting?”  I saw Dennis a few years back at a high school reunion, and we were laughing about the “surrey with the fringe on the top.”  He said the Jeep is still in use at the farm, minus the bling.  Army Jeeps were built to last.

To Our Moms, thank you for life, for raising us and for teaching us life’s lessons.  To the Mothers Of Our Children, thank you for our sons and for our daughters.  Thank you for loving us, for marrying us and for putting up with us.  To Our Grandmothers, thank you for your love, your kindness, your nurturing and your wisdom.  To the Mothers Of Our Grandchildren, thank you for giving us the precious gift and the joys of a third generation.  Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms everywhere!  We love you all, and today is your day.  Enjoy… Still Cruisin’!  – J.                    

It’s the time of year again for one of the enduring rituals of spring and summer.  No, I’m not talking about baseball.  I am referring to lawn care.  We spend hundreds, sometime thousands of dollars and spend countless hours each year establishing, maintaining and grooming our acre of sod.  At the risk of sounding sexist, men are usually the ones who tend the turf, although that is certainly not always the case.  Particularly with my next door neighbor, Sue.  A retired Air Force Colonel, she spends most of her waking hours tending to her lawn and garden.  And it shows, too.  Her yard is absolutely beautiful, worthy of a spread in Southern Living, Country Gardens or Birds and Blooms.  

People generally fall into one of three categories when it comes to lawn care.  There are the ones that are obsessive, the ones that only do what they have to do, and the ones who simply do not do anything at all.  The obsessive ones are the ones that cannot stand one weed in their yard.  Growing up, a friend of mine’s Dad fell into this category.  I would pull into their driveway and he would be down on his hands and knees, crawling about the yard pulling up weeds.  That’s a little over the top.  The easiest and most normal method is to apply the Weed & Feed, water it in and let time, Mother Nature and chemistry take care of the rest.  

Then there are those who only do what they have to do.  They might plant a little seed every now and then, but weeding and watering?  Forget it.  The weeds are great!  They’re green.  Mow ’em and they look like grass!  Bare spots?  So, what, I’ll run over them, kick up a dust storm and run off the mosquitos!  Rocks?  Run right over them too.  Who knows, I might sling a few and take out a squirrel or three!  

And finally, there are those who simply do not care.  If they ever cut their grass at all, it’s because they finally have to, if they can even cut their grass.  Eventually their yard gets to a point where Agent Orange couldn’t even kill all the vegetation.  Who knows, after defoliation, they might even discover a couple of lawn mowers or a car that was pulled into the yard and forgotten six or seven years ago.  If you are really lucky, someone like this lives right next door to you.  Some, however, have money and some semblance of pride, and will at least hire a lawn service to perform the tasks of care and maintenance.

I fall somewhere in between Categories One and Two, leaning more toward Category One, but stopping short of crawling around on my hands and knees pulling weeds.  I plant a new lawn every year, keep my grass cut, my hedges trimmed and my plants pruned.  I always keep seed in the feeders for the birds.  I even put ears of corn out for the squirrels.  My driveway and walkways are swept clean.  I pick up the limbs in my yard and keep the leaves at bay with my leaf blower. 

Speaking of the leaf blower, that brings us to the heart of the subject of this week’s edition of Car Talk.  You can’t do proper lawn care without the proper equipment.  And, as I said earlier, men generally do the bulk of the turf work.  So, you know what that means.  We can’t just have a Murray push mower or an Ozark Trail leaf blower.  We have to have the biggest and the best and, guys being guys, we may wind up with a hot rod like the one pictured here.  My leaf blower is like a flame thrower.  I’ve never used a flame thrower, but I’ll be willing to bet my leaf blower is just as much fun.  It’s one of the back pack type, a Stihl BR500 with a 200 mph velocity that could blow all of The Three Little Pigs houses down, including the brick one.  

How I came about owning this piece of gardening equipment is rather interesting.  When I worked nights, especially on the weekend rotation, I would get home at around 8am Saturday morning and hit the sack.  Of course, what happens on Saturday mornings all across America?  Yard work, of course!  Try to sleep with a 200 mph velocity leaf blower running right outside your bedroom window.  I slept with ear plugs in my ears and a pillow over my head.  I came to curse the man who invented the leaf blower, even stating as such on social media, which drew a backlash of negative comments.  I went out and bought a Black and Decker lithium powered string trimmer at Lowe’s.  The package also included a leaf blower with a velocity of about 7 mph.  My neighbor Sue fell out laughing when she saw me using it.  She called it my “Barbie” leaf blower.  I limped through the season using it, all the time suffering the slings and arrows of ridicule, mostly from myself.  On Christmas Morning, Jackie brought in a huge box with a bow and my name on it.  I opened it, and there inside was the Stihl BR500 leaf blower with the 200 mph velocity.  It was a great gift, and made clearing the yard of the fall leaves a much easier task.  I refuse to be That Guy, however.  I vowed never to use it before 10am and never, never before 1pm on Sundays.  I still use my “Barbie” leaf blower, however, for touch up and the stairs.  It is much less cumbersome climbing and cleaning stairs with a small hand held blower than with a 200 mph behemoth strapped on your back.

The lawnmower itself is the one piece of that lawn care hinges upon.  Without a lawnmower, you simply cannot cut grass.  I learned to use a lawnmower as a boy, like most of us.  I used to mow my grandparent’s yard in East Atlanta with one of the old manual push type mowers.  Mind you, theirs was a very small yard.  At home, mowing the lawn was one of my weekly chores.  I do not remember the brand, but we had a silver push mower my father bought at Ace Hardware in Gresham Park, and it lasted well over ten years.  I could not wait to learn how to use it, and felt like a real grown up when I learned to gas it up, crank it and cut the grass all on my own.  

And, guys love to work on lawnmowers, too.  I have seen men pay twenty dollars at a yard sale for a junk lawnmower and take it home with a smile on their face.  Somehow we just love the challenge of small gas engine repair.  One year at the Christmas Parade in McDonough there was a group of guys in the parade on Snapper lawnmowers.  These weren’t your average Snappers, either.  They were painted red, orange, blue and hot rod yellow.  Some had wheelie bars on them, and they all had loud, souped up motors.  The ones with the wheelie bars would pop the front wheels up to almost a ninety degree angle and ride down the road on the two back wheels.  Boys will be boys…

In the early Nineties I bought a Murray 85 push mower and used it for ten years.  In the end, I had to take off the air filter and prime the carburetor to get it started.  Eventually the magneto went south, so it would run for a while and conk out.  I would have to wait about ten minutes for the engine to cool down, then crank it and continue.  Sometimes I would have to prime the carburetor again to get it going.  All this in the middle of July.  Marie kept encouraging me to buy a new one, but no, I said, there’s no sense spending the money while this one is still running.  Finally, one blazing hot Saturday I cut the back yard and the engine conked out just as I was finishing up.  I still had the front yard to go.  I pushed it up to the front porch where Marie was sitting having her toddy.  As I came to a stop in front of her, one of the front wheels fell off.  “Well, that ought to tell you something right there,” she said.  I had to admit that life was finally over for the Murray 85.

When I got home from work on Monday, Marie was there with a young man from a local outdoor power equipment company.  He was unloading a brand new John Deere L100 lawn tractor.  I was speechless, thrilled and excited to climb aboard and go.  I cut the front yard and then cut the back yard again for good measure.  

That was fourteen years ago.  Today, the old John Deere is still functioning, but I can see the end on the horizon.  The seat is torn.  Getting it started these days is kind of like preflighting an airplane.  I first unplug my battery maintainer and close the hood.  The start safety system had to be bypassed a few years ago, so to crank it now I have to turn the key to the on position and then use a toggle switch to turn the engine over.  I then fire up the seven horse Briggs and, while the engine is warming up, pump up the rear tires, both of which have a slow leak.  I then pull out of the basement and into the yard.  The deck belt has a tendency to slip off when the engine cranks, so I pull into the yard and test the blades.  If the belt has slipped off, I turn the engine off and climb under the mower.  I loosen one of the pulleys, put the belt back into place and tighten the pulley.  Then I fire the tractor back up, climb aboard and engage the blades.  I set the deck level, put it in gear, let off the brake and ease out the clutch.  Off to cut grass again… Still Cruisin’!  –J.        

The way I met my friend Larry is a pretty interesting story.  My father owned a 1960 Chevrolet Apache pickup truck that I’m convinced could have and may still survive a nuclear blast.  Faded brown, inline six, three on the tree.  Fleetside longbed.  Weighed close to five thousand pounds.  Seat belts?  Hah.  Padded Dash?  Please.  Radio?  Surely you jest.  Air Conditioning?  Stop, you’re slaying me.  It looked similar to the one pictured here, only not quite as rough.

He picked me up in it from football practice one afternoon.  Spring practice to be exact, March of 1970, probably about 5:30 pm.  We pulled out of the school parking lot, through the intersection of Bouldercrest Road and Key Road, and down to Mary Lou Lane to take a left and head home.  A motorcycle was approaching in the oncoming lane.  A 1969 Honda Scrambler similar to the one pictured here.  A beautiful bike, pristine.  No match for a five thousand pound Fleetside.  We waited for him to pass before turning, and as he got closer, it became apparent the cyclist was looking down to his right and did not see us.  Unbeknownst to my father, his left front was slightly over the line, and the Honda struck the front end of the truck at about forty or forty-five m.p.h.  I can still vividly see the rider rolling across the hood of the truck right in front of me.  I actually think he was wearing a silver helmet.  We both jumped out of the truck to check on him, and he assured us he was okay.  The Scrambler, however, was not.  Mangled and bent, it lay in a heap in the middle of Bouldercrest Road.  The Fleetside, of course, suffered no damage whatsoever, and if it did, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.  The main thing was that the young man riding the bike was unhurt.  He was about five years older than me, blonde and on his way to work at Kroger.  He told us his name was Larry Kagelmacher.  “Kagelmacher,” my father replied.  “Is your father’s name Herbert?”  Larry told him yes.  Of course his father’s name was Herbert.  There just weren’t that many Kagelmachers on the south side or anywhere in Atlanta, then or now.  It turned out my father and Herbert knew each other from East Atlanta, and were brothers in the Masons.

When the police arrived and assessed the situation, the officer asked Larry if he needed medical attention.  Larry said he did not.  I do remember at one point he asked my father what was the color of his truck.  “I don’t know, what would you call that… P-ss Brindle?” he replied.  The officer laughed, then wrote him a ticket for crossing the yellow line.  Then he proceeded to write Larry a ticket for “not avoiding an accident.”  Even my fourteen year old mind realized at the time that that was just wrong.  The poor guy just went head to head with a Chevrolet Apache on a three hundred pound motorbike.  A ticket for “not avoiding an accident” was adding insult to injury, even if the only injury was, thank goodness, to the bike.  

What happened next just shows what a different time and place in which this occurred.  After issuing the citations, the officer asked if he should call a wrecker.  “No, we can just load the bike up in the back and we’ll take him home,” said my father.  Larry said that was fine so the four of us lifted the remains of the Scrambler into the back of the truck.  Larry had told us earlier he lived on Bouldercrest Road in Cedar Grove.  “I’ll ride in the back,” said Larry, “when I bang on the top our house is the next one on the right.”  The officer left and we headed down Bouldercrest.  When we got to Cedar Grove, Larry banged on the top, and we pulled into the driveway.  His dad Herbert came out  and we told him what had happened.  Larry reiterated that he was not hurt, and we unloaded the Scrambler from the back of the truck.  Daddy and Herbert talked about East Atlanta and some of the goings-on at the Mason Lodge.  Larry went into the house to call work, and we climbed into the truck and headed back to Gresham Park.  In so many ways, due to “One Call That’s All” and the ones that are “For The People,” this simply could not have happened today.  First of all, the officer would not have just taken Larry at his word that he was okay.  An ambulance would have to have been dispatched to verify as such.  Secondly, a wrecker would have to have been called.  Today, an officer would not have even given us the choice, let alone help us load the bike in the back of the truck.  And finally, we never would have been allowed to take off with Larry in the back of the truck.  He would have to have ridden in the tow truck, strapped in safe and sound with a redneck road hog wrecker operator at the wheel, while we made our way home to Rollingwood Lane.

Fast forward forty years.  Larry married Jackie, I married Marie and we lived our lives.  Larry and Jackie divorced in the mid-nineties, but remained and still are very close friends.  Marie passed away in ’09.  Jackie and I had started dating in the spring of 2010.  Her mother had spent a week in the hospital, and I went out to visit Meme on the day she came home.  Larry came to visit as well, and we both came to the front door at the same time.  After Jackie got over the initial surprise (she was actually speechless, if you can believe that) of us walking in together, she introduced us.  Larry stuck out his hand and said, “Hey, Jim, Larry Kagelmacher.  Etheridge, Etheridge… that name sounds familiar.”  I shook his hand and said, “Hey, Larry, you and I actually met on Bouldercrest Road back in 1970.  I was in a brown Chevy Apache and you were on a Scrambler.”  He immediately started to laugh, looked down, shook his head and said, “Oh my Lord.”  “You do know that that wreck was entirely my father’s fault,” I said, “He was over the center line.”  “Yeah, and I got a ticket for Not Avoiding An Accident.  What was the deal with that?”  We both laughed and agreed that it is indeed a small world.  We hadn’t seen each other since that evening on Bouldercrest Road.  But there we were, standing in the living room of Jackie’s mom’s house… Still Cruisin’!  –J.   

This is Masters Week.  Being a born and bred Georgia boy, and from a golfing family, to me The Masters is A Tradition Like No Other and Masters Sunday is a National Holiday.  My family used to gather at my and my late wife Marie’s house on Masters Sunday for pimento cheese and chicken salad sandwiches, beer, wine and cocktails.  We would put five dollars each into a white Masters porkpie hat and draw the names of every player that had made the cut.  Then, we would sit down at 4:00 pm and watch the tournament.  Whoever had the name of the player that won would win the pot.  And the winner of the tournament would get a green jacket, a lot of cash and his name etched on the big silver trophy and in history. 

That being said, in this edition of Car Talk we are going to look at another golfing tradition; The Golf Cart.  Or, buggy, as it is called across the pond.  When you play a round in the U.K., you don’t get a cart, you “hire a buggy.”  I’m sorry, but “buggy” just doesn’t sound right to me.  A “buggy” is something you push around the grocery store.  Of course, they also call a dump truck a “tipper lorry.”  Just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?  I mean, let’s face it, “dump truck” just sounds more heavy duty than “tipper lorry.”  My grandsons had a big yellow Tonka they kept at my house.  They called it their “dump twuck.”  I may be wrong, but if they were out playing in the sandbox with some of the neighborhood kids and called it a “tipper lorry” as opposed to a “dump twuck” they probably would have gotten beat up.  But I digress…

The first golf carts gained widespread use in the mid Nineteen Fifties.  Most were electric.  Companies like Cushman, E-Z-Go, Club Car and even Sears and Roebuck produced them.  Gas powered models first appeared sometime in the late Fifties.

Today, golf carts are used for any and all things, a truly functional utility vehicle.  Many communities are now built with the golf cart as the primary mode of transportation.  Peachtree City, Georgia was one the first, employing a one hundred mile network of paths.  Residents can get to homes, shopping centers and parks via the paths that wind through the wooded scenery.  McIntosh High School even has a parking lot for golf carts.  

When I was a child, my Great Uncle Leonard, who lived on a farm in Carl, Georgia, suffered a debilitating stroke.  He and Aunt Sabra’s house was about a half mile from the mailbox.  They bought a golf cart so that Uncle Leonard could pick up the mail and ride around the property.  When visiting, it was always a treat for me to get to drive the golf cart to the road, retrieve the mail and bring it back.

The first golf course Marie and I played regularly was Idlewood, which was a public course in Lithonia, Georgia.  Idlewood was a course I could write volumes on, but today we will just stick to the carts that were in use when we first started playing there in the early Eighties.   The manufacturer slips my mind, but I think they must have been the originals from when the course opened in ’63.  They were the three wheeled jobs that you steered with a handlebar.  There were no tops on them so, due to the way Idlewood was laid out, you needed a crash helmet while in the the middle of the course.  Seriously, it was not unusual to be lining up a shot and have a ball land next to you, sliced by some hacker two fairways over.  

I cannot tell you the number of times Marie tried to kill me in a golf cart.  Extremely impatient, it is a wonder she was able to play golf at all, let alone embrace it and excel at it.  She always drove because I dawdled too much.  After hitting a shot, I simply did not move fast enough getting back in the cart.  She was notorious for flooring the gas when I had one foot on the floorboard and one in the fairway, my rear end somewhere between the side rail and the seat.  This would work okay with a gas powered cart, where there is somewhat of a delay from when you stomp the gas and the engine responds.  In an electric cart that responds immediately, however, it can be deadly.  She wrenched my back and twisted my ankles more times than I care to count.

She actually threw me off the back of a cart once.  We had played Sugar Creek Golf Course with our friend Bob and one of the assistant pros at the course.  Marie and I rode, the other two walked.  It was a scorching hot June day and after the round, Bob rode in the cart with us back to the clubhouse, and I stood on the back with the bags, holding onto the frame for the top.  In those days, to get from the eighteenth green to the clubhouse, you drove across the parking lot.  I had a bottle of Michelob in one hand and held onto the frame with the other.  Marie started to swerve back and forth, yelling, “Ooh, doesn’t that breeze feel good!”  The swerving threw me to one side because I was only holding on with one hand.  I yelled, “Marie, stop it!”, but she gave it one last yank and off I went, rolling across the parking lot.  I got pretty skinned up, but, I am proud to say, never spilled a drop of my Michelob.  The lesson here?  Never ride on the back of a golf cart.  Especially with a bottle of beer in one hand and a reckless English woman driving.

I was playing with some friends at Georgia National once, and my partner Donnie told me to pull over after leaving the first tee.  He got out of the cart and pulled the hatch door above the motor off.  “What are you doing?” I asked.  “I’m taking the governor off this thing,” he said.  It is amazing how fast a golf cart will go without a governor.  A couple of times I almost turned it over.  After the round, we pulled over and he hooked the governor back up before we got to the cart barn.  “Do me a favor, Donnie,” I said.  “What’s that?”, he replied.  “Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t EVER show Marie how to do that!” … Still Cruisin’!  –J.