First day of school

   My brother has three grandsons and one granddaughter on the way, EJ.  Two of the boys start kindergarten today on disparate plans in Upstate SC and the older will be in second grade. Second grader is interested in history and amphibians. In Six Mile SC Saturday I gave him a primer on the backpedal frog off the coast of SC cause Uncle Steevie is only as smart scientifically as the last NOVA show he saw on PBS.

   Which reminds me, I must tell him about the shocka rolla or something the big Tide that rolls up the Amazon when the moon lines up just right. Rivetting Nova as far as I'm concerned.

     These boys should bring enough to the table to do okay in Life maybe even something extraordinary. In their extended ancestry they have a Vice President of Reynolds Aluminum, a Vice President of JP Stevens, three medical doctors, two cousins who made 1350 or better on the SAT, an Uncle with a letter from Bill Moyers who said "people like you make a difference"; and if you want to include Grandfather Jordan's sister's great granddaughter an international opera singer and a cotton bowl queen. 

    Got the Cotton Bowl queen in there for EJ on the way cause her Momma aint bad lookin and she just might have a shot. Plus her Daddy's jr prom date is now the wife of Cubs pitcher Jon whats his face.

    Not braggin cause everybody 's got family and in our great country who knows.

    Ive said too much. But as way into my sunset years now here is the heart of the story, My first day of first grade in Hayesville, NC Early September of 59, sixty one years ago.

    I was in Mrs. Gray's class on the east side of the school which went all the way through 12 in Clay County, Pretty sure the only one. I remember lining up for lunch. We had to walk across a bus road to get to the cafeteria though I don't remember any mayhem on rainy days but it was an open air adventure about thirty yards and we were the closest to the lunch room.

   Either on that day or soon into the year we divided up into reading groups of about seven each and the prettiest girl I knew, about as pretty as Darla of the Little Rascals, set next to me. She had on a blousy expansive crinoline-- I think was the material--with well starched undies musta been cause she almost took up two seats and you could hear her outfit crunchin ever time she moved.

   Her Dad and Mom were a handsome couple and he was a highway patrolman who later became the chaufeur for the Governor of NC when they moved to Murphy.

     I think a Crenshaw fellow, some Davenports, Jackie Auberry and Doug Lowe were in my class and maybe one of Doc Padgett's sons. My best friend Kim Wimpey who had a pretty older sister was in the other class. It's hard to tell who was in which cause their all jumbled up in the annual and it is not near at hand in the moment. I think Ray Allison was in there somewhere and the fellow who had a birthday two days before mine.

    I moved away the second week of January 62 and that was another memorable first day, but the first of the first was in Hayesville NC where I was baptized.

 

Ron Rash short story Neighbors reverberations for this Trump Moment

  Ron Rash and I are contemporaries and regional neighbors by 15 miles though we weren't formally acquainted till our fifties. He was raised in Boiling Springs NC and I just across the state line and the Broad River in Gaffney, SC. You can check my archives on main page for Sept 2010.  Click on that, a worthwhile interview and read.

     Yesterday I read his short story Neighbors that kicks off his new collection, In the Valley. It is set in Shelton Laurel just outside Marshall NC, a Civil War location that haunted his novel World Made Straight, the movie adaptation of which had a scene in which Steve Earle's rendition of Just as I am would give Billy Graham the Willies.

    But that is beside the point for this blog. Lately I have been trying to square Isabel Wilkerson's new book on Race and Caste with Robert Jones latest on White Religion, with the Reel South documentary on Confederate Flag Removal in New Orleans and the BLM march in Clemson SC where Trevor Lawrence said he came down with the Saints Drew Brees in the twitter dustup with Trump re patriotism etc.

    And I have considered recent notions in the cancel culture to erase Faulkner and Saint Flannery Oconnor which I think is a bridge too far, or in the Smoky Mountains of Rash and my Grandmother Mary Alice Helton, The Back of Beyond. She was 2nd grade educated on the Tennessee side and I was born in Newport.

       So come back to this as I got to do some thinking hopefully with an email response from Rash himself. In my mind Rash comes down with the great Baptist Marney, and the Episcoplain preacher Fleming Rutledge when she explored the axis of evil a few years ago in a sermon a few weeks after 43 announced his adventure in the Middle East. Willimon liked it and put it in his Duke collection from the Chapel.

    If I understand Rash's art, he is siding with Meghan Daum of the Problem with Everything re the excesses of identity politics and left wing shaming. To categorize folks without giving them the benefit of their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.

    Still I think Rash agrees with me, whatever the question is Donald Trump is not the answer; more specifically Mark Meadows was not good for Western NC much less the country. I got stock in that cause I was baptized in Hayesville. Doug Jones is better for Alabama than Tommy Tuberville and Biden Harris is leaning in a better direction than Mitch McConnell.

    Rash hasn't said that. Like my Daddy preaching the Gospel and reaching for the transcendent, Rash does the same with his fiction with considerably more eloquence than my Dad but it doesn't matter for this blog. Let me consider this further and come back next week to see if I'm gettin by with a little help from my friends. 

    Read Rash's stories. If not a blessing, is good for the soul, Third Testament material for the American canon, part of the Now that follows the Old and the New Testaments.

 

     

  

 

     

Stright outta Gaffney, SC to Roger Dutton's barbershop in Bammer

    Tommy Martin is a friend of mind from the 60's tennis teams write up to his kindness as a Super Trumper to publish some guest column submissions of mine in his Cherokee Chronicle. Tommy has something close to a Lewis Grizzard gift for telling hometown stories and marinating the nostalgia. In that way he marinates like Roger Dutton.

     Here is a Martin special on Guns smoke

       

    I know why the old TV series “Gunsmoke” was so popular with menfolk. I’ve told you before that I enjoy kicking back in the late afternoon and watching the Cowboy Channel. I like some of the shows better than others – I wish “The Virginian” would go back to Charlottesville or wherever he came from – but the old reliable on that network remains “Gunsmoke.” Every day at 7 p.m. get your chaps and 10-gallon hat on, partner and load up that cap pistol. As I was watching this week, I began to realize why that show was so popular with all us bubble-bellied old men laying there with potato chips and Little Debbie crumbs trickling down our chins. That show combines every single thing a man loves in life, and does it in a palatable way. Here’s what we menfolk love about Gunsmoke: · The primary female character and Matt’s heartthrob was a saloonkeeper who served as a madam on the side. You could get about anything in The Long Branch that you needed after a long day of looking at the north end of southbound cattle. · Everybody drank alcohol continuously. From the Sheriff to his deputies to Miss Kitty to the town’s only physician, they all pretty much stayed snockered all the time. And nobody cared. · They played poker 24 hours a day. Anytime a fellow wanted to tickle the pasteboards, there was always a game going on in the saloon. And apparently, nobody was married, because there was never a nagging wife that came crashing in and broke up the game. · If you got sick, stabbed, shot or came down with anything from hangover to hangnail, old Doc would take you upstairs in the magic office and you’ll be well the next day. Then you, Doc and Chester would all have a couple of snorts before you left. · You didn’t have to watch your personal hygiene too closely. If you didn’t feel like bathing or shaving for a few days (or weeks), nobody dove under the bar tables when you came in. Everybody else stunk, too. · Every business in town had a spittoon in the corner. · You could keep your ride filled up and wiped down for 50 cents a day. (Of course, it was just one horsepower.) · There were no telephones, email or other gadgets equipped with small cameras. You could get away with anything. So hey, what’s not to love about Dodge City and “Gunsmoke?” No wonder it was the number one TV show for 40 years – and still is with many of us. After all, there was only one rule – stay away from Miss Kitty. (Copyright 2010, The Cherokee Chronicle; comments and criticism to: cherokee

Dallas Cowboys, Gaffney SC and the Flag

       The fall of 2017 I saw my second NFL game in 40 years. It was two days after Trump had implied two of Nick Saban's Heisman trophy winners, Mark Ingram and Derrick Henry were Sonsabitches cause they didnt bow down to his interpretation of the Kaepernick affair that was on fire that season.  Nick had a reply for Trump in Saturdays Down South on Monday saying Trump was full of deceit. You can interpret Saban's statement for yourself.

     I saw the Titans play Pete Carroll's Seahawks a few years after Gaffney's Sidney Rice played for Pete. Caught a ride with a Bama Revenant who took his son and Aunt Paula by marriage, a 74 yr old divorcee who was a high school friend and classmate of the Steelers Terry Bradshaw.

   The picked my up in Ft Payne Alabama cause they missed the exit in Collinsville. I drove on up there for the ride and once in the car I don't think there were more than two minutes silence to Nashville. No Radio , all chat.

    The game was two days after Donald Trump's profanities at Colin Kaepernick's expense in Huntsville Alabama in a fundraiser for the Episcopalian Senate Candidate Big Luther Strange. Bama's Senior Senator and the University of Alabama Legend Richard Shelby was present.

   At the 4 pm kickoff Derrick Henry and his Titans stayed in the locker room in solidarity with the visiting Seahawks while the National Anthem was sung. But the country singer took a knee when she finished. There was an uproar in the stadium and a fellow from Kentucky in the next row below me about two seats left was outraged. I was oblivious to the provocation of the mayhem and said something in his hearing and Aunt Paula, Terry Bradshaw's High school friend almost had to come to my defense.

    August 2 a USA Today columnist made the case the Kneeling conversation has changed and it is mostly left to "whiners" to fight the lost cause. Apparently that didn't stop my good friend Tommy Martin and his staff from carrying the piece about the Flag and the Dallas Cowboys.

    A few years ago I read the piece Dallas 1963, a book about that year in Dallas, home of the godfather of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Dallas was an ugly place that year with the anger of the Birch Society and fundamentalists who were calling the Civil Rights movement Communist, and as we all know ended with the assassination of JFK. The book advances the sentiment, Dallas Loaded the gun while Oswald Pulled the trigger.

    

        1963 was just seven years after the influential pastor of FBC DAllas, WA Criswell told a joint session of the SC legislature: "You wouldn't call a chigger, a chiggerow, now would ya. The Day before he said the same thing to a howling convention of Baptist pastors from across the state. One of my Dad's seminary professors and later my Baptist hero, Stewart A Newman stood up at the pulpit after and Said : "WA Criswell doesn't speak for me."

    Now 60 some odd years later Bobby Jeffress at FBC Dallas is a Super Trumper.

     Ive also read the Princeton Professor Wuthnow's book Rough Country about how Texas brand of Baptist fundamentalism shaped the modern day Republican Party. First time I saw Lee Atwater's Nword memo was in that book, an evolutionary political strategy further revealed in the 25th Minute of Ms Duvernay's Netflix documentary 13th. Take a look at that as you consider how Trump and Fox News and conspiracy noise media distorted Kaepernick's attempt to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter Movement.

     The last couple years the book Dying of Whiteness crossed my radar. It looks at three congressional districts where working class white folks are eaten up with Trump adoration. Makes a compelling case they have been hoodwinked into voting against their own health and economic interests by Trump's playing their resentments against Blacks and Mexicans and what they think is their cultural heritage.

     

     The previous NFL game I attended was in the fall of 1971. The  Furman band was invited annually to Atlanta Falcons  for a halftime game. I was down on the field waiting on hafltime with about two minutes to go in the Half. I looked up from our endzone camp and saw Archie Manning of the Saints from about the twenty hurl a beautiful high arc soft touch toss to his receiver at the back of the endzone. About the most beautiful spiral I had ever seen in person to that point.

    Maybe even historically greater for my pilgrimage on this earth, however, was three years earlier, when in the first year, first month of full integration of the public schools in Gaffney SC, I saw my friend Danny Parker launch a crucial pass with minutes to go to Donnie Ray Littlejohn against Lancaster. It is legend in Gaffney how much that pass did to relieve tensions of integration in Gaffney, home of one of the top one hundred all time High school dynasties in the nation according to Max Prep.

     So John Lewis is Dead but Trump is till in office and distortions about Patriotism and the Flag and Free Speech and rich black athletes continue to run amok.

    Here is hoping Gaffney and the nation can come to clearer understanding on these matter and lean with the good folks at John Lewis funeral at Ebenezer toward that more perfect Union.

    Stephen Fox is a 1971 graduate of GHS where he proudly served on the Bi-racial committee with Charles Foster, Kay Brumbach and Grady Sizemore, the father of consensus best player in MLB the first Decade of the 21st Century. Currently riding out the Covid in Central SC, for the last 30 years has lived in Alabama. A lower case free lance writer and raconteur, he is also a graduate of Furman. You can find his illustrious blog, so named by a former chair of the Davidson History department at foxofbama.blogspot.com