WINT

By Randy Reynolds

It would be a shame if the only thing my Uncle Wint was remembered for was shooting Mama Maude, because he was much more than just a man who shot his mother.

When I was five, my Papa Bonnell took me on the bus to visit Wint in Miami—a trip about which I remember only two things: Papa taught me how to pee in a commode in the bus station without making a splash; and Aunt Evelyn said that Wint was the neatest spaghetti-eater she had ever seen. I felt proud for Wint that a woman could love him so much that she would say a great thing like that about him. Papa and I watched him twist spaghetti onto his fork and it was amazing. I had never seen anything so neat. I figured a man who had such manners could probably also pee without making a splash, just like me and Papa.

Wint was a tall, skinny farm boy and could hold his own in a fight. He dreamed of being a prize fighter, but that didn’t work out--he was well on his way to getting killed in his first round when my dad threw in the towel for him.

Wint made his living as a layout man for newspapers, using scissors and glue to arrange items on the pages before they were sent to the printing press. He earned high wages as a strike-breaker at newspapers in the Midwest. He even worked for the Baton Rouge paper and lived on Lee Road (not far from us) for a few months in 1965, but Louisiana passed some kind of union law he didn’t like, so he moved back to Georgia.

Wint graduated from law school, but failed the bar exam and, being a Reynolds, decided to teach the Georgia bar a lesson by never again taking their blasted test!

He ran for the State Senate, thinking he could win despite not having any financial backing. Wrong.

When he was in his 30's and I was 12, we convinced ourselves that the shiny specks in the granite in his backyard in Atlanta were gold. At either his suggestion or mine—I forget which—we got some hammers, busted up the boulders and put the chips on the stove in frying pans to melt the gold out of the granite. But the only thing that melted was Aunt Evelyn who came in from work to find rocks sizzling on the stove. She promptly threw us, our rocks and the frying pans out of the house.

As a young teen, I responded to an ad in Grit by a "Nashville songwriter" who promised to put music to any poem for twenty-five dollars. I sent him the money and a sad love poem I had written. Sure enough, in a few weeks, I received a .45 rpm record in the mail—my words, set to music, with my name in big letters on the label. Uncle Wint was so excited about my accomplishment that he wrote some songs, too, and sent them to the same company.

(At fifteen, I played “Song For A Rainy Day” by Randy Reynolds on my WARB radio show, but my boss Mr. Rick shit his pants and told me not to do it again.)

Wint moved to Alaska without his wife and four children and became a baker. His love affair with Alaska was off and on for the rest of his life, but working in the bakery became his passion—second only to coaching Little League baseball.

His love affairs with his wives were off and on, too. Both divorced him, or he them (I wasn’t in the loop) but from time to time he moved back in with one ex-wife or the other.

When Wint was in his forties, he bought, on the spur of the moment, two huge motorcycles--one for his teenaged son Danny and one for himself. He had no experience with motorcycles—but it fit his image of what he wanted to be at the time.

When he got a dog, it was the meanest dog that ever lived—a German Shepherd named Jim. After Jim's demise, he got some huge Saint Bernards, even though he was living in the city and had no place to keep them.

When he got upset with how things were going in this country, he decided that only one man had the solution: Dirty Harry. So he bought a .44 magnum revolver just like Dirty Harry’s and made it clear that he would use it if he ever got the chance.

His chance came soon enough.

Mama Maude and my Aunt Katrina lived together after Papa’s Alzheimer’s got so bad he had to be sent to the nursing home. Mama Maude sat up with him every day while Katrina was at work. Night after night, the ladies came home exhausted, went straight to bed and lay there waiting for sleep and wondering about various sounds. They scared themselves into thinking that someone was trying to break into the house. Every night. They needed protection from Dirty Harry.

It was late evening and Mama Maude had been at the nursing home all day. Katrina was out with friends. Wint had been summoned to bring his .44, and the plan was for him to sit up all night and wait for the break-in noises and then open fire.

He was careful with the loaded gun, placing it atop the pile of clothes he was lugging in from the car. When Mama Maude opened the front door, Wint stepped away from the screen and the gun fell off the clothes and hit the porch and fired. Cement and bullet fragments tore up Mama Maude’s leg.

By the time the emergency room doctors had patched her up and assigned her to a wheelchair another trauma unit was reviving Wint who had worked himself into a state worse than his mama’s.

Mama Maude, who lived another five years, has descendants scattered all across the nation now, a majority of them too young to remember her.

Even fewer remember Uncle Wint. He lived another 17 years, only to be robbed by a real intruder—Alzheimer’s. Some, not all, of his great-grandnieces and nephews may have heard his name, perhaps in conjunction with the story of the night he accidentally shot Mama Maude. But there is so much more to his memory than that!

He was a man who got a law degree; tried boxing, politics, song-writing and searching for gold in his back yard. He coached Little League. He ran a bakery. He was Dirty Harry and Easy Rider and Orville Redenbacher all rolled into one. And he ate spaghetti neater than anybody.

My Uncle Wint was a man who followed his dreams and he didn’t stay down when they didn’t work out.

Bonnell Winfred Reynolds, 1929-2006

• Brooke Abercrombie- Batt Thanks for sharing! I enjoyed reading this!

  February 19 at 4:10pm ·
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  Diana Taylor That was lovely. I loved that man! He could always make me smile.

  February 20 at 7:10am ·
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  Kimberly Ann Quinn and I was there the evening he shot Mama Maude.. funny or not so funny story.. when I heard the shot, Little Eddie told me that Mama Maude had been shot so of course I got on the phone to call the police because I thought there was a crazy man outside shooting. Wint walked in the door and saw me and asked me who I was calling I said the police and he replied, put the damn phone down I shot her. I put the phone down and thought ohhhhhhhh my God, my life is turning into a Sally Raphael show... lol

  February 21 at 4:45pm · · 1 person
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  Kimberly Ann Quinn only one shot.but it made a huge explosion, fragments went into the door and her legs... cops were never called. Wint took her while Hati held a towel around her legs to stop the bleeding.. When she got to the hospital they asked her what happened and she started crying and said it was an accident and she didn't want to say what happened...