REYNOLDS WRITER

MOVIN' ON UP...TO THE EAST SIDE

2012-01-18T22:12:00.008-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

From 1965-2004, I worked for 34 Radio and TV stations in Covington, LA; Hammond, LA; Marietta, GA; Canton, GA; Slidell, LA; Jacksonville, FL; Jacksonville Beach, FL; Gainesville, GA; Oak Grove, LA; Bastrop, LA; Monroe, LA; Pineville, LA; West Monroe, LA; Pensacola, FL; Leesburg, FL; Alexandria, LA; Sherman, TX; Alexandria again. (I worked long-distance for stations in Alamosa, CO & Vicksburg, MS, but never lived there.)

The stations I devoted most of my life to included: WARB, WTGI, WBIE, WCHK AM-FM, WBGS, WVOJ, WJXT-TV, WJNJ, WGGA, WLBA, KWCL AM-FM, KJBS AM-FM, KPAL, KARD-TV, KUZN, KJBS, KNAN-FM, WMEZ-FM, WLTE, KZMZ-FM, KALB, KDSX, KDSQ-FM, KQID-FM, KSYL, KLAA-FM, KFAD-AM, KNAN-FM, KZBR-FM, WVBG AM-FM.

Highlights included getting started, at age 15, at WARB in Covington, LA; being weekend anchor & assignment editor and fulltime reporter at 20 at WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, FL; co-owning stations in Gainesville, GA and Sherman, TX. Managing (in this case micro-managing) KNAN-FM in West Monroe to the highest ratings in the country (where Sherry began working with me fulltime;) reinventing KZMZ & KALB in Alexandria, LA. The absolute peak came at the end, working 9 years with Mark Jones to make history at KNAN-FM in Alexandria.

Sherry and I often took jobs at the lower-rated, less-successful stations and built them up. As we grew them, we moved to better homes--like the Jefferson's of long-ago TV fame we were "movin' on up to the eastside..." or wherever. Thus, we moved 59 times during our broadcast career, from dumpy apartment or used mobile home to a house, then a big house, then a bigger house. We spent the money we made to make up for the times we didn't have it. That felt really good, but is not a good strategy for accumulating wealth, LOL.

Some of our Radio and TV adventures, in no particular order, are detailed in my blog posts:

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-i-was-run-out-of-covington.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/12/sherrys-getting-married.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/dream-charts.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/magic.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/02/madagascar-hissing-cockroach.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/02/aaaaaiiiiiyyyyyyyyyiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/03/eye-in-sky-ib-flyin.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/locked-and-loaded.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/03/tallywhacker-bridge.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/03/snakes-spaceships-and-naked-deejays.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-hope-you-dance.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/06/country-love.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/goal-setting-break-it-down-into-small.html

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/05/persistence.html

SHERRY'S GETTING MARRIED

2011-12-24T20:30:00.013-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

Dora Mae Wells heard her 16 year old granddaughter's boyfriend (me) on the radio only once. Mistakenly assuming that I, the son of a preacher, was going to do a religious show--the only kind she ever listened to--she heard me spinning records and reading news, weather, and live commercials. She endured my jokes and my barely disguised on-air messages to Sherry. Finally, impatient to hear the gospel, she looked around at the rest of the family in the sitting room and said, "Well, when's he gonna sang?"

But I was just a deejay and there would be no singing from me that day in the fall of 1966 nor ever. She figured out that I was not going to become the preacher she'd hoped that I would be, but she was happy that her oh-so-young granddaughter was happy with me.

A few weeks later, shortly before Christmas, 1966, Dora Mae's large family gathered around her deathbed in the Bogalusa, Louisiana, hospital and tried to understand the little ditty she was singing over and over. It was, "Sherry's gettin' mar-ried. Sherry's gettin' mar-ried. Sherry's gettin' mar-ried." She left this world with those words on her lips.

Now we're older than Dora Mae was when she died and we're celebrating Christmas Eve alone--well, as alone as you can get in a candlelit room decorated with dozens of angel what-nots, statuettes, carvings and pictures. (Sherry desperately believes in angels.) In the flicker of the candles as the angels listen silently, we're talking about our 45 Christmases together--especially the first one when her grandmother sang us her blessings as she went to her reward.

Someday we'll put together our whole story, the bad with the good, but tonight as we reminisce, the things that have us laughing (and feeling mushy) are the following few memories that have been posted on this blog from time to time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. The day we met: I knew her name. I knew her parents. I knew the boys she had dated. But I had never spoken directly to her before that day, that day she stood there, glowing, in the middle of the yard, with that hair just the color of the hair I always dreamed about whenever I dreamed of girls, and her clothing, modest though it was here at church camp, still not modest enough to obscure her allure.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

2. The night we got engaged: We leaned against an oak felled by Hurricane Betsy and I said, "Will you marry me?" And she said, "Me? You want me?" She made me tell her twice and then she said, "Okay!" And it started raining and we ran for the Volkswagen and turned on the radio to hear the Lovin' Spoonful singing "Rain On The Roof." We thought it was a sign. Of course, when you're in love, everything's a sign.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/purple-poodle.html

3. The night we told her parents: ..Me, suddenly chicken-hearted, "Honest, ya'll, I never touched her." .Sherry held my hand and wrinkled her cute nose at me. "Yes, you did, you big liar!"."I'm going to throw up," said Mary Louise. (Sherry says this story is slightly exaggerated & I'm hurt that she thinks I would exaggerate. LOL)

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

4. The rumors: The common wisdom at our daddies' churches was that we wouldn't last six months together.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/six-months-at-most.html

5. Moving on down the road: I got fired for asking for a raise two weeks before the wedding. We got married anyway and moved 500 miles away where I started auditioning for jobs and Sherry enrolled in high school.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-i-was-run-out-of-covington.html

6. Shy and scared: I heard a relative say of Mrs. Randy Reynolds "That girl is shy as a rabbit." Well, the rabbit became a tiger.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-hope-you-dance.html

7. It happened so quickly; it seemed like we blinked our eyes and suddenly we had grandchildren.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/treehouse-full-of-miracles-all-my.html

THE PURPLE POODLE

2011-07-14T10:54:00.029-05:00

by Randy Reynolds

At the 1960 St. Tammany Parish Fair, I lost all my money first thing in the morning at the shooting gallery and walked around hungry the rest of the day with the smell of corndogs in the air. Traumatized by hunger (no money, no food, no way home until the bus delivered me back to Lee Road late in the afternoon,) I promised myself I'd never again waste all my fair money before I even had a chance to eat a corndog.

Six years later,when I took Sherry to the fair, I ate two—mine and hers, (taking advantage of the fact that she was still too shy to eat in front of me.)

Later, on the Tilt-a-whirl, as she joyously screamed bloody murder and held onto me for dear life, my stomach rolled independently of centrifugal force and I gripped the safety rail in misery. (Lord, why did I eat that second corndog?)

When the Tilt-a-whirl stopped spinning, Sherry said, “Your face looks kind of green.”

I opened my mouth and responded, but not with words. Spewing up corndog, Co-Cola and souvenirs from meals gone by, I looked to her for sympathy before I died, but all I got was, “Be careful. Don’t get it on my shoes.”

When I was at my lowest, on my hands and knees, dry-heaving in the midway, she said, “It’s after eight. We better be getting home.”

I panicked. It wasn’t time to leave. Nine o’clock was her curfew and I had big plans in mind for this girl, this night... before the clock struck nine. I couldn’t take her home yet. I had to get her in a better mood so I could spring my trap. What could I…

My gaze fell upon the shooting gallery. I hated that shooting gallery for taking all my money in 1960. I had come back each year since, seeking revenge, but never got it. What made me think things would be different now? Nothing. But I needed more time with Sherry and so I said the first thing that came into my mind: “Let’s try the shooting gallery.”

“We really need to get going, Randy.”

I spat the last of the bile from my mouth and pointed to the wall of prizes. “I’ll win you that purple poodle.”

The purple poodle was the largest stuffed toy on the wall.

“Okay,” she said, matter-of-factly.

My bluff had been called. I could stand there and shoot in that rigged gallery forever and never win a prize; which would be more time with Sherry, but I’d be spending it making a fool of myself, getting ripped off again, like all the times before.

But miracles happen: Either Jesus came down and directed my shots or that carny was so distracted by the pretty girl at my side that he didn't do what he should have done to make me lose, and I won the purple poodle!

Sherry, whose belief in me was apparently (and unaccountably) unlimited, said, “I knew you could do it.”

We took the scenic route home from Covington to Robert by way of Mandeville, stopping on a strip of Lake Pontchartrain shoreline that, despite its lack of sand, we called “the beach.” We ran and played among limbs and tree trunks left over from Hurricane Betsy’s passage the year before. Stopping to catch my breath, I leaned against a fallen oak, reached out for her hand and said, “Will you marry me?”

“Me? You want me?” she said.

She’d seen me at my worst that night, throwing up the last corndogs I would ever eat. She’d heard and believed my outrageous promise to win the purple poodle, a valuable clue, if one was needed, about my personality. And now this rash (?) proposal …because I could no longer imagine life without her… Could she square all that with whatever dream she had of the life she wanted for herself?

She made me tell her twice that I was sure and then she said, "Okay." And it started raining and we ran to the car and turned on the radio in time to hear The Lovin' Spoonful's Rain On The Roof, which we took to be a sign. (Of course, everything's a sign when you're in love.)

She named the purple poodle Pierre and slept with him, holding him desperately tight, as tightly as she could, every night from then until the following June, when I took his place.

I HOPE YOU DANCE

2011-07-09T12:14:00.051-05:00

By Randy Reynolds

Until Donna Archer plied me with girl-drinks at The Bleachers—Monroe, Louisiana’s favorite hot spot in the early 1980’s—I had never danced before. Unless, of course, you count the Hokey-Pokey, which I don’t. Or that time with Mary Alice Dubuisson’s mother, but that was only practice.

When my first-grade teacher said we were going to “dance the Hokey-Pokey” I tried to opt out on the grounds that I didn’t want to go to Hell, but she assured me that God loved the Hokey-Pokey (…and He probably does…along with a lot of other dances) so I did it.

In junior high (at Lee Road,) I was elected Mardi Gras King one year, and Mary Alice Dubuisson, the queen, invited our “court” to her house for a dancing lesson a few days prior to the ball. No way could I let my parents know that I was going to a Catholic girl’s house to dance, so I arranged my own transportation (horseback, through the swamp.) Smelling like a horse, and—in retrospect—probably dancing like one, too, I spent a fearful, guilt-ridden, afternoon at the Dubuisson home doing the shimmy-she-wobble (a synonym for dancing that my dad, the preacher, often used.) When word reached my folks that I was “involved in the Mardi Gras” and that dancing was expected to break out, they forced me to resign my kingship. Or abdicate. Or whatever eighth-grade Mardi Gras kings do when their parents won’t let them shimmy-she-wobble.

I took my girlfriend Sherry to Homecoming and the Prom at Covington High, but we didn’t dance. She sat demurely behind the stage while I took the microphone and emceed the event. After my welcoming remarks and introduction of the king and queen and so on, we fled into the night to be, like all good church kids, alone. Away from all that sin.

At those events, Sherry would be the only girl in the gym without makeup—her folks, as a religious principle, didn’t believe in it or allow it (and even as an adult she was scared to use makeup until, at 31, a neighbor took her by the hand, sat her in front of a dresser, and showed her what to do.) Sherry was 15 when I met her, and her only makeup accessory at the time was an eyelash-curler that she used obsessively. If she wanted to highlight her cheeks, she pinched them until they turned red. The only thing she was allowed to put on her lips was chapstick.

She went hungry at school because she was too shy to take a single bite in front of anyone else. She’d go through the lunch line at the CHS cafeteria, take her tray to a table, and sit there looking at her hands in her lap, afraid that if she looked up she’d see somebody laughing at her. When the kids around her finished eating, she’d get up as they did, and throw her food away.

I gradually, during that last year of high school, helped her become at ease eating in front of people. (I have a picture of her in a blue jersey dress mugging for the camera with her mouth full, one of the first times she ever took a bite of anything in my presence.)

She never had a fancy dress (much less an evening gown or formal) until I took matters into my own hands when she was a junior in high school. With savings from my $12.00 per week salary, I bought some red velvet and lace, took Sherry to a seamstress to be measured, and paid to have a dress made. She was the belle of the ball (that is, the church-sponsored/no-dancing Christmas banquet sponsored by a Covington church.) Midnight struck at 9 p.m. for us (her rigidly-enforced curfew), but to make sure that I would never forget our Cinderella night, I arranged, soon

afterward, to have her sit for a portrait in that red-velvet dress. (Ogden studios painted in some makeup, even though she wasn’t wearing any when the picture was taken, and Sherry felt guilty about it. I thought it was pretty sad to fear that even makeup on a picture was a sin.)

Buying material together? Taking measurements? Commissioning a dress and a portrait? Teaching her to eat? Was I somewhat controlling? Yes. I told myself she needed it and I was perfect for the job because in many ways I was just like her—I knew where she was coming from—shy and repressed, a loner, a preacher’s kid, self-conscious.

Like her, I wasn’t allowed to go to “worldly places of amusement” such as the movies, bowling, skating, swimming in the presence of the opposite sex, dancing, or to parties where dancing was going on. Like her, I felt out of place associating with people who didn’t interpret the Bible the same way we did, because those people, based on what we’d been taught, were going to Hell unless they had a last-minute conversion. (This caused me to feel very sorry for the Catholics—especially the nice ones.)

I'd had even more trouble fitting in at high school than she did, thanks, in part, to arriving at Covington High in the fall of 1964 with my bandaged big toes sticking through holes cut in the tops of my shoes. This footwear, which put a serious crimp in both my social and athletic life, was designed by Dr. Kety and necessitated by the repeated toe surgery that he had none-too-delicately performed on me... but that’s another story.

I was still a loner when I met Sherry. But I was the loner who was also band announcer, student emcee, Boy Scout leader, WARB deejay, chorus member, jokester, writer. I was also an off-and-on athlete on school teams (mostly off); I was a daredevil; and I was freakishly competitive at anything that ended with a winner and a loser--tennis, badminton, archery, horse-racing, swimming, darts, cards, chess, paper football, hangman, Scrabble, hula-hoop, bouncing a ball off the side of the house, shooting baskets, throwing rocks. Winning something—anything—was a validation that I needed every day.

So the preacher’s daughter who was way too shy and tender, and the preacher’s son, who was overly aggressive and daring, realized we complemented each other perfectly, got married at the end of the school year and moved 500 miles away to begin life anew.

By her thirties, when she was a mother three times over, married half her life and still poor as dirt, things changed. Better stated, she changed things. In a breathtaking arc of self-motivation and determination she transformed herself into a successful, and—surprise!!—aggressive businesswoman.

One day at the beginning of this transformation, she was forced by a caring neighbor into a seat in front of a mirror and taught the mysterious rituals forbidden to her under pain of hellfire as a teen: the neighbor taught her to use makeup. Something about the process, the look, or maybe just stepping across that line, accelerated the emergence of the real Sherry. (Patricia, wherever you are, thanks for doing that for your repressed little neighbor!)

Sherry’s first boss in Monroe—Donna—dragged her into The Bleachers in the early 1980's, convinced her to fortify herself with some sweet-tasting drink, and pushed her onto the dance floor to commit the mortal sin of dancing. Some nights, the two of them gave me dance lessons, too—my first since Mrs. Dubuisson.

Obviously, learning to dance as a thirty-something would not normally be considered an earth-shattering experience. But it was for us, because no fire and brimstone rained down and the earth did not open up and swallow us whole.

---------------

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance

I hope you dance

Time is a real and constant motion always

Rolling us along

Tell me who

Wants to look back on their youth and wonder

Where those years have gone
I hope you dance

~I HOPE YOU DANCE, written by Tia Sillers/Mark Sanders

-----------------------------------------

She held him desperately tight in bed each night from October until the following June when I took his place.
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/purple-poodle.html

When, despite all the prophecies at church, the world did not end that year, I began to breathe normally again, without the nervous snort that had driven off all my friends. I also quit believing every little thing I heard at church.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/sneak-preview-of-elvis-syndrome.html

Parking to watch the 'submarine races' was a sin, but I figured it would be overturned someday like all the others and I wanted to be ahead of the curve.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/hokey-pokey-shimmy-she-wobble-and-other.html

Eddie came to school the next day wearing a neck brace but refused to give me credit: he said his neck was already sprained before the fight.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/preachers-kid.html

I got a fulltime girlfriend, a really jealous one, carved her initials into my arm, and stopped trying to impress all the other girls with my respiratory skills.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/acorn-trick.html

I settled onto the ground beside Alex' grave and ate my lemon, peel and all, while looking over the spelling words on the mimeographed handout. The first word on the sheet was misspelled, but I assumed it was supposed to be "Audacious." I also assumed I didn't want to waste a perfectly good afternoon studying words I could already spell better than my teacher, so I said goodbye to Alex, bridled my one-eyed horse Ranger and rode up the road to Johnny Johnson’s house to play with his monkey. http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/audacious.html

I threw the baseball as hard as I could and someone yelled, “Coach, look out!” Coach Whittington turned just in time for the ball to hit him in the eye. He dropped like a sack of feed. http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/daredevil.html

In retrospect, I don't believe there were as many virgins at Youth Camp that year as Brother Ernie thought.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/03/blackberry-wine.html

I rushed into Holden's bathroom and locked the door behind me. Being alone, at last, with the condom machine felt weird. I could hear my own heartbeat. The back of my neck felt hot. So did the forty quarters in my front pocket.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/03/forty-condoms.html

A self-confident little thing, she had no qualms about slipping into the bedroom with me in the middle of the school day and testing her resistance to temptation.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/out-of-closet.html

Conventional wisdom at my daddy's church and hers, was that we were too young to get married. They gave us six months at most.
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/six-months-at-most.html

Everybody in radio knew that "housewife music" was the smooth, slow, calming, middle-of-the-road stuff. But the lonely, bored housewife that I left at home each morning taught me different. When she was down, Sherry would call during my show and say, "I feel so bad. Play something to get me going. Play Crocodile Rock." And I'd play one fast song after another, only the fastest, funnest dance tunes, the hot hits! No soft stuff! She'd get the housework done in record time, blindfold the dog and beg me to hurry home. When I invented a format based on Sherry's preferences, we became the number one station in the nation.
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/magic.html

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1583176009

OUT OF THE CLOSET

2011-07-07T23:25:00.028-05:00

by Randy Reynolds

The problem with living in a small town like Covington was that everyone knew what everyone else was doing. And when they were doing it. And where. It was pretty pathetic, for instance, that I couldn’t even skip school to meet my girlfriend without being noticed by Coach Salter, who certainly hadn’t noticed me for those few weeks that I had sat on his bench dying to get into a game. Somehow, though, as he watched me walk away from school in the middle of that day in 1965, his memory was restored, my name came back to him and he reported me to the principal, Louis Wagner.

A beige, eight-passenger 1964 Chevy station wagon crossed the intersection in front of me as I neared my girlfriend's house. I noticed the car because we had one just like it, and whichever model we had in a particular year, it seemed like those were the cars I noticed the most.

(What are the odds of a truant crossing paths with his dad a half block away from his girlfriend’s house en route to a romantic tryst? Like I said: small town.)

Dad continued on to the hospital to visit some sick church members, stopping at the front desk to borrow the phone to call my principal.

Mr. Wagner was a former Navy Captain. He took pride in running a tight ship at Covington High and he did not appreciate men (or boys) going AWOL. He especially did not appreciate being put on the spot. So when my dad said, “Can you explain to me, sir, just why you allow your students to roam the streets of Covington in the middle of the school day?” the wheels of military justice began to turn in Captain Louis’ head.

On my girlfriend's front porch I popped a Lifesaver into my mouth, intending to stand there just long enough to crunch it and give my breath that sweet Wint-o-green smell, but the girl hadn't invited me over just to be a porch ornament. She flung the door open wide, looked both ways, up and down the street, and jerked me inside, double-locking the door and lip-locking me all in one fluid motion.

(Rendezvous underway! It would be jeopardized by yet another witness, but that was later, minutes into the future and I was in no position to heed the future. All I cared about was 'now.' My biological clock was ticking.)

She stripped the school books from my hand, flipped them onto the couch and maneuvered me toward her bedroom, a place where we both knew that nothing much was going to happen because the instant it could happen, she’d give me her “Respect” speech-- the one about how much my respect meant to her, how it meant more than all the joy a boy and girl could have; how it was 'forever;' and ‘forever’ was more important than ‘now.’ That speech of hers could have stopped Pharoah’s army at the edge of the Red Sea. The way she delivered it could make a grown man cry. And I, a lowly sophomore, was nowhere near being a grown man. She, therefore, had no qualms about slipping into the bedroom with me in the middle of the school day and testing her resistance to temptation.

We were getting close to her self-imposed limits--the "Respect" speech was probably on the tip of her tongue--when someone banged on the front door. Our tongues retreated into our own mouths, our lips came unglued from each other and all four of our feet hit the floor at the same time.

“Who IS it?” she yelled. The person on the porch kept pounding.

Despite her petite build, my girlfriend had the strength of a sumo wrestler--or else her adrenalin kicked into high gear like those people who do superhuman things in emergencies, like lift a car off their baby when it falls off the jack. She grabbed me by the front of my shirt, dragged me across the room and threw me into the closet. “Get in! And if you make a sound, I’ll kill you.”

I knew she meant it: she would not think twice about killing me if I did anything to jeopardize her reputation.

The knocking continued. “Just a MINUTE!”

She opened the closet door again, threw my books and shoes at me, and hissed, “Stay!”

Crammed in among the women's clothing, trying to will myself not to scratch what itched, and trying not to sneeze, I poured out my soul to Jesus. I made Him every promise in the book, everything I could think of to make Him happy, and all I asked for in return was for Him to keep my dad from marching into this house, yanking me out of the closet and belt-whipping me in front of my girlfriend. I was saying, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus..." just like the old ladies at church, when I heard the front door open.

My girlfriend greeted someone way too cheerfully. Then a voice that definitely wasn’t my dad’s asked if he could come in. The voice got closer, so I figured the answer was yes. He was in.

It was her other boyfriend. Supposedly her ex, but if he was an ex why was he stopping by in the middle of the day when she was skipping school? How did he even know she would be here? Was this a habit of hers? Had she skipped school with him, too? He was a friend of mine, but a couple of years older than me and I had to ask myself what I would do if he opened the closet and found me. Should I say something clever, or just knock him down and run for my life? Unable to think of a good one-liner, I decided that violence was the way to go.

Someone turned on the TV set. What the hell? The Cardinals were playing the Yanks in the World Series. The volume got louder and all I could hear was Curt Gowdy describing Bob Gibson's high hard ones that the Yankees couldn't handle. This was infuriating: were my girlfriend and her boyfriend really interested in this ballgame, or was it on just to keep me from hearing what was really going on? I couldn't stand this any longer!

I eased out of the closet and over to the bedroom door. Opening it just a crack, I could see the two of them still standing. It looked like he was trying to get further into the house and she was blocking his way. If the fool got to the bedroom and discovered me in there, the girl would kill us both. She’d get a butcher knife and slaughter us where we stood rather than allow her reputation to be compromised by one boyfriend’s discovery of another in her bedroom. She was that concerned with her reputation.

Deciding to save her the trouble, I put on my loafers, picked up my books and snuck out the kitchen door. I made it back to Covington High in time hear the final bell and blend in with the crowd that erupted from the school.

Riding the bus back to the country that afternoon, I was oblivious to the other kids around me. Half-listening to Robert E. Rabbit on WTIX, I stared at my slyly smiling reflection in the window between me and the Lee Road scenery that I knew so well. After every emotion I’d felt that day—fear, anger, jealousy, a couple of minor heart attacks, a chance to test the “Respect” rules again, I felt relieved. Triumphant.

Life was good for a boy who knew he was too smart to get caught.

------------------

BACK TO INDEX: http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-hope-you-dance.html

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1583176009

REMEMBER THAT SNAKE?

2011-04-26T22:05:00.010-05:00

by Randy Reynolds

My brother Ricky and Uncle Donnie, both 13, were impressed that Daddy had let me drive the station wagon to Atwood’s store in the rain. Except for me, age 15, there was no adult in the car. And to prove just how grown up I was, I sped up and slammed on the brakes several times to make the car spin and slide. They screamed and begged me to stop, then begged me to do it again.

We were on Lee Road beside the Campground when the brightly-colored snake crossed in front of us. I slammed the gear into park, jumped out of the car, put my foot on the snake’s tail and yelled for Ricky to get me a stick.

Donnie jumped to the Campground side of the ditch, away from the action, and lit up a Winston.

“Watch out!” he yelled.

I looked up in time to see a huge gold sedan sliding across the center line toward me and the snake. It barely missed us, fishtailed to a stop and backed up.

A woman leaned out the window and said, “Watch out, boy! There’s a rattlesnake by your foot!”

“No ma’m. It’s just a corn snake,” I said. “I’m catching him for a pet.”

She looked at me like I was crazy and spun away.

After Ricky used a stick to pin the snake to the pavement, I grabbed it by the head and it wrapped itself around my arm, coil after coil, a brilliant, twisting, pulsing orange armband that I wore home, driving with one hand.

I strode into the kitchen like a hero, placing the bread upon the sink then thrusting my arm and the writhing snake over my mother’s shoulder from behind.

She bleated and, as her knees buckled, threw a handful of raw spaghetti into the air; my grandmother screamed for Jesus; the tea kettle whistled. My father and grandfather and four younger sisters rushed into the room, saw the snake, and fell all over each other reversing direction.

Above the pandemonium I could hear Daddy threatening to do some very creative things to me, so I exited in the opposite direction.

Ricky and Donnie followed me into the yard laughing and punching each other in the arm like Gomer and Goober, imitating Mother’s scream and Daddy’s threats.

I put the corn snake in an army trunk in the shed and fastened the latches securely.

After a meal during which Mother looked at me like I was the spawn of the devil and Daddy alternately berated me and snickered, we three boys hurried back to study our prize. I unlocked the trunk and opened the lid an inch at a time, so as not to give the snake a chance to get out.

“What the…?!!” I threw the lid open wide.

Ricky and Donnie gasped.

The trunk was empty!

The three of us get together now about once every decade, usually at a funeral. If we're outdoors, Donnie will light up a Winston as we talk about the dearly departed. And when the conversation lags, one of us always says, "Remember that snake?"

How it got out of that trunk is one of the enduring mysteries of our lives.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1583176009

THE BB GUN

2011-04-22T23:30:00.005-05:00

By Randy Reynolds

The first Jenkins I slept with wasn’t Sherry, the one I eventually married. It was Raleigh Jenkins, an evangelist who came to run a revival at our church in Macon, Georgia, just before Christmas, 1957, when I was eight.

I had no idea that company was coming and I didn’t see him arrive because I was already asleep in my rabbit pajamas with the big ears and footies when he got there. In the middle of the night when a crack of thunder woke me up, I scrambled out of bed and down the hall as fast as I could move in the thick pj’s. I slipped into my parents’ bed and snuggled up against Daddy’s back, where I felt safer than anywhere else. I went to sleep to the sounds of Daddy’s soft snores and rain pelting the tin roof.

What I didn’t know was that Mother and Daddy had given the evangelist their room and I was snuggled up to the back of Brother Raleigh. He was a very surprised young preacher when he woke up soaking wet the next morning with an equally wet bunny rabbit snuggled against him. He sat up in bed, which woke me up. I took one look at him and screamed and Mother came running.

She made excuses for me. “He comes to our bedroom when he gets scared at night. The thunderstorm must have woke him up and he thought you were Gene and, and…”

At the breakfast table, Brother Raleigh described how it felt to get peed on by a large rabbit and my daddy roared with laughter. Preachers are, first and foremost, performers and Brother Raleigh, gratified by the response, told the story over and over. I hung my head in shame, anxious for breakfast to be over so I could go touch the BB gun again—the one that I was going to get for Christmas that I had discovered hidden in my parents’ chifarobe.

I wanted that Daisy BB gun more than I would ever want anything in my life, with the possible exception of horses (which were out of the question) and the Jenkins girl (whom I would later marry.) Many years later, when I first saw The Christmas Story, in which Ralphie begged for a Red Ryder BB gun, it was like someone had written a chapter of my life. I had gone through the same ordeal as Ralphie, begging my parents for a BB gun. My mother, like Ralphie’s, had argued against it, saying I might put my eye out. I was bitterly disappointed that I wasn’t going to get it. But then, while plundering their chifarobe, I found it—a no-frills, lever-action Daisy BB gun. My heart nearly leaped out of my chest the first time I saw it and touched it, and since that day I had frequently snuck into the chifarobe to hold it and pet it. I kissed it, too. It was soon to be mine, all mine. My very own BB gun. Proof that I had become a man.

An evangelist living in the house all week can’t be ignored by his hosts, so Brother Raleigh went where Dad went: on hospital rounds, visiting church members, paying bills—he shared Daddy’s schedule for the week. Which meant he heard a lot of talk, because my daddy was a nonstop talker. They say 40,000 words is a novel? Well, my daddy spoke about a novel a day or more. From one subject to the next, he just talked and talked and talked and talked. And people liked it, because he was a good talker, with lots of great stories and a first-rate mind and could talk about things that other people hadn't learned yet. The problem was, once he started talking, he didn’t hold anything back. He even told Brother Raleigh about the BB gun in the chifarobe and about Mother being against it because I might shoot my eye out.

And so it came to pass that the day after the revival was over, I gave my little brother and sister the slip and snuck into the chifarobe to hold my BB gun. But it wasn’t there. I went into the living room and examined all the presents under the Christmas tree, but none of them was shaped like a BB gun.

I looked under the beds, behind the couch, between the stove and refrigerator.

“What are you looking for?” asked Mother.

“I know y’all bought me a BB gun,” I said.

“Oh, sweetie…” she began.

“But it’s not in the chifarobe anymore. I think Ricky took it.”

“Now, Randy, you know I didn’t want you to have a BB gun this year. You’ll put your eye out.”

“But you already got it. It was in the chifarobe and now it’s gone!”

“I know, sugar, but your Daddy and I, well, we just thought you ought to wait a year or two.”

“Nooooooo!” I wailed.

“Your Daddy mentioned it to Brother Raleigh and he has a little nephew that wants a BB gun, so he bought it from us and we’re going to get you something better.”

I ran away from her, threw myself onto my bed and cried till I ran out of tears.

Many years later, when I was co-owner and General Manager of a radio station in North Georgia, a middle-aged fellow down on his luck applied for a job as a deejay. I didn’t recognize him at first, but the resume’ revealed that he was the same Raleigh Jenkins who used to be a preacher and had run that revival for us in Macon. He remembered the bunny rabbit peeing on him the night of the thunderstorm and we had a good laugh.

I forget now why I didn’t hire him. I hope he doesn’t read this and think it was because of the BB gun.

BLACKBERRY WINE

2011-03-24T12:53:00.037-05:00

By Randy Reynolds

Richie Maklary made an excellent blackberry wine in his Granny Barker’s canning jars.

The 1963 edition was opaque with a hint of toxic fungus and a slushy consistency highlighted with blackberry pulp. The flavor profile was fruity with notes of yeast and sweeter on the palate than pure Domino sugar scooped from the bag. The finish was gaseous and the result on the digestive system was, to put it mildly, odiferous. But it was the effect on the imagination that was most notable. Under its influence we thought we were invincible--and we almost were.

If we'd had BFF’s back then Richie would have been mine except for the year I couldn’t breathe because our Sunday School teacher told us that Red China was going to nuke Lee Road before the end of the year; I know my nervous snorting for air made me a pariah all that year and I can’t blame Richie, or anyone, for not wanting to be around me. However, when both Jesus and Red China tarried and Lee Road was saved and I could breathe again without sounding like a rooting hog, Richie once again became my best friend.

He and I went to the same church (Shepherd’s Fold) where we whispered and cut up on the back bench and my dad would stop in mid-sermon and order me to the front—memorable embarrassments for me, great amusement for Richie.

In the woods one day near the home of Lee Road's first grade teacher Miss Lewis—who had the only brick house in our extended community—a blacksnake crossed our path and Richie just reached down and picked it up. I was fascinated that someone could be that crazy. And I’ve been doing the same ever since.

(A friend of ours would later try to burn down those piney woods around Miss Lewis’ house—apparently just for the sheer joy of watching it burn—but a deputy happened to drive by just as said friend was throwing gasoline onto the bushes. Our friend was arrested and the woods were saved. But never let it be said that Lee Road was boring.)

Richie and I were among the culprits who got caught breaking the rules on a camping trip by skinny-dipping in an almost-freezing creek because we wanted to prove we were as manly as our Scoutmaster who had told a tale about doing the same thing at our age. Mr. Bill didn't buy our argument that we were just honoring him by following in his skinny-dipping footsteps and he sent us home early to explain ourselves to our parents.

It was at Richie’s house, on a Sunday night, that I first saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Richie had feigned sickness to get out of going to church that night and I had been visiting with him all day, so I took the liberty of staying with him despite knowing that I'd be punished for it later. Our church was very down on anything related to The Beatles—and this was years before John commented that their fame was so ridiculous that they were more popular in Britain than Jesus--a money-raising, attendance-boosting statement our churches are still cashing in on! Although they performed in suits and ties, The Beatles’ appearance was ridiculed from the pulpit--hair halfway covering their ears; those communist Beatle boots; songs designed to corrupt young people, with titles such as I Wanna Hold Your Hand, P.S. I Love You, She Loves Me, Do You Wanna Know A Secret and Love Me Do. Why, that trash would make a single girl want to get married and a married one want to shimmy-she-wobble (the word my dad, the pastor, used for dancing, which we regarded as a sin even for married couples)!

When Richie burgled the Fussell's storage shed on Jarrell Road, I was right behind him. We stole a few whatnots and decorated his tree house with them. This was the first time I had stolen anything since the age of 5 when I had slipped a roll of Lifesavers into my underwear at the grocery store and Daddy, noticing my remarkable bulge as we walked to the car, had made me go back in and apologize. Now, feeling guilty about our burglary, I decided to put the stuff back where we got it. So one day when Richie wasn’t around, I went to his tree-house and stole it all back. But a funny thing happened on my way to the Fussell shed: I got the better of my conscience and took the whatnots to MY tree house. It was a proud moment: I had stolen the same stuff twice without getting caught.

We found a set of bedsprings and a mattress in the woods—who knows who put them there, or why they left used condoms for anyone to find. We dragged the bedding to a strategic position beneath Richie's tree house and executed daring swan-dives and heart-stopping back-flips, knocking the breath out of ourselves each time we landed on the mattress and springs. A slight miscalculation could have killed us.

(My mother, when I whined “All my friends are going, why can’t I?”, never knew how useless it was to say, “If your friends were going to jump off a bridge, would you jump off it, too?” Of course I would! After following Richie out of the tree-house, backward, with my arms folded in death and my eyes closed, a bridge was no big deal.)

It was Richie, on his cousin’s mare Lucky, who talked me into a race on my brother’s gelding Kawliga on the paved portion of Lee Road. When Kawliga fell, I suffered a massive blow to the head and now I wonder if that damage is the reason that I think differently from everyone I know who came out of the Lee Road area--(which, in turn, makes me wonder if all they need is a whack on the head to straighten out their thinking, too.) Also, that was the fall that busted my knee, an injury that was to keep me from being drafted during the Vietnam War. Who knows how differently I would have turned out had I not, under Richie's leadership, cracked my skull and knee on Lee Road that day?

Richie and I got many of our life-lessons at the same time, including the sex education offered at the amphitheater at Youth Camp in which Brother Ernie Miller was touched by the Holy Ghost and "spoke in tongues" after warning us what would happen to “these boys who go around deflowering our virgins.” (I don't know if "our virgins" referred to America's, or the South's, or that particular Youth Camp's virgins, but--in retrospect--I don't think there were as many of them there as Brother Ernie thought.) Richie and I weren’t even sure what the word meant and had to go for further clarification to some of the older boys—maybe the very culprits, themselves.

That was the year that Brother Ernie, like all young preachers that I remember, preached about his wanton early years and how God had saved him from all the terrible things he used to do that WE hadn’t even had a chance to do yet. The saved part didn’t sound nearly as delightful as the sins he was saved from—such as mixing Aqua Velva aftershave with Coca-Cola as a substitute for liquor. Richie and I spent the rest of that Youth Camp drinking Aqua Velva and Coca-Cola and talking about virgins. For these and certain other reasons, it’s a wonder we didn’t go blind that year.

Back home after Youth Camp, we got off the Aqua Velva and started back on Richie’s blackberry wine. There was nothing that loosened our inhibitions as effectively as sharing a jug of Richie’s wine before committing a burglary, picking up a snake, falling backwards out of a tree-house, racing horses on the highway or speculating about virgins.

THE EXAMPLE

2011-03-02T22:09:00.009-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

I hereby apologize to all the kids I grew up with—or, at least, to the ones who turned out bad. As the preacher’s son, I was supposed to be their example. If I was, Heaven help 'em!

(Photo: Randy, Ricky, Ronda, Renda, Ramonda & Renee Reynolds with Pastor & Mrs. Reynolds,

who had a thing for "R's" --the horse was Ranger, the cat was Ruff, and dogs, over the years, included Rusty, Raleigh, Ringo, Reagan, Racquel and--his latest--Raven.)

WHY I DIDN'T BECOME A BABLISS PREACHER: My daddy preached in churches with no air-conditioning, where insects of various denominations flew straight through the open windows and congregated to worship the bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling above the pulpit. On summer nights in those churches, the humidity was so thick that people had to fan the air toward their faces to help themselves breathe. The cardboard fans they used were promotional items from the local funeral home--reminders, if any more were needed, that death was nigh.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/why-i-didnt-become-babliss-preacher.html

LAND OF INNOCENCE: We knew a girl who would take her clothes off and turn around in front of us for a quarter. But a quarter would buy a comic book, a Three Musketeers bar, some bubble-gum and a Coke, so the girl didn't make much money that summer.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/land-of-innocence.html

BOOKWORM: I limped after him, thinking, What a cool guy. A grown man who talks to me and wants to show me something in his garage. I'd never been in his garage before. I couldn't wait to see what he wanted to show me.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/bookworm.html

MR. BILL: While church members got acquainted with their new pastor (my dad,) two of my future friends greeted me not by telling me their names and asking for mine, but by taunting that I didn't look so tough and declaring they had a cousin who could beat me up. They left to fetch him and soon returned with a boy my size whom I had to fight in order to establish my place in the pecking order in their little world.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/10/mr-bill.html

I'D CHOOSE HORSES: 1960, Covington, Louisiana. A huge baby-faced man named Alex Jenkins stops by to get acquainted with his new pastor (my dad) and sees me riding a stick horse in the yard, playing cowboy with my younger brother. "Would you like to have a real horse?" he asks. My heart almost leaps out of my throat.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/id-choose-horses.html

MAKING THE BARKER GIRLS BEHAVE: The choir director in front of Dad set the pace for the singers behind him by jerking her hand rapidly from side to side like slapping a child. Off to the pastor’s right, Sister Catherine made the piano do everything but sit up and beg. The congregation joined in the clapping. Some folks raised their hands and shouted (which, today, would be called ‘praise.’) One man felt the Spirit and danced in the aisle. I whispered to a friend. Dad saw it and motioned for me to come forward. I panicked and tapped my brother. “Daddy wants you to go up there.” Poor little Ricky went to the rostrum, got bent over Daddy’s knees and took my spanking, his yowls of pain blending with the shouting.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/09/making-barker-girls-behave.html

WHEN KENNEDY WAS MY HERO: Kennedy's election and our house burning down were how the 60’s started for us, but I don’t think the two things were related unless the fire was God’s punishment for how I felt about Kennedy. For it was in that soon-to-burn bedroom, watching the flickering image of the young senator on a black-and-white TV with a coat-hanger for rabbit ears, that I betrayed my faith and started hoping he would win.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/04/when-kennedy-was-my-hero.html

AUDACIOUS: I sat on Alex’ grave and studied my spelling words for as long as it took me to eat the lemon, then thought ‘The heck with it’ and went to bridle my one-eyed horse Ranger to ride up the road to Johnny Johnson’s house to play with his monkey.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/audacious.html

DOODLEBUGS: If that last old house of ours on blocks is still there, a boy of a certain size could crawl under it today, way past where the cur dogs used to sleep, past the stray bricks, broken bottles and rusted plow parts, back to the soft, gray dirt of the doodlebug villages and find a plastic hero astride a plastic horse where I left them on the last day of my childhood, surrounded by attackers. The one on the white horse was me. When I placed me there, I owned the world.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/10/doodlebugs.html

BLOWING UP THE BOARDWALK: Why we were digging behind the shed, I don't recall. Motives were forgotten in the excitement of discovering a dark green metal box filled with hundreds of beautiful brass bullets. A box of gold bullion could not have excited us more. We did with the bullets what anyone would do. We used a hammer and pliers to break them apart, poured the gunpowder from each casing into a jar and went looking for something to blow up.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/blowing-up-boardwalk-how-not-to-make.html

THE END OF THE WORLD: The sweet, gentle lady who taught the Junior Boys Sunday School class convinced us that she knew the exact year the world would end. And when that year arrived, I developed the nervous habit of snorting air—sucking three or four breaths loudly through my nose before exhaling, a sound that drove away all my friends. I couldn’t blame them for avoiding me, but the snorting was beyond my control. It was the only way I could breathe that year. When the year ended but the world didn’t, I realized that I had a lot of catching up to do. A lot of catching up.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/sneak-preview-of-elvis-syndrome.html

MY LITTLE BLACK BOOK WAS A BIBLE: Jesus was probably not too happy about my secret hobby of grading girls in church, giving them a score on their physical appearance and writing the results in my Little Black Book, which happened to be a Bible, but He never said anything about it…

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/my-little-black-book-was-bible.html

PREACHER'S KID: The first time my future wife ever noticed me, I was in 6th grade at Lee Road School, she in 5th and she was in love with one of the triplets I was fighting. The fight was a rite of passage: the triplets jumped me because I was a preacher’s kid. Only if I fought back hard enough would they and others leave me alone in the future. So it was no-holds-barred. We fought with fists, feet, elbows, teeth, fingernails--everything we had. Almost everyone on the playground, including my future wife, yelled encouragement to the triplets. My little brother, who could have been a big help, stayed neutral.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/preachers-kid.html

THE ACORN TRICK: The thing that made me special at LeeRoad School was my ability to put an acorn in my nose and make it come out my mouth. My fame spread near and far and I found myself performing this trick at every recess and lunch break and after school and church. Girls said “Ewww!” and“Yuck!” and other gratifying things and I smiled and reversed the trick: putting one acorn into my nose, pretending to swallow, spitting a second acorn out of my mouth. Other boys, not realizing that I was using two acorns, tried to imitate my trick, but all they did was hurt themselves.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/acorn-trick.html

ROCKET SCIENTIST: When the nurses came to Lee RoadSchool to give polio shots the last year before we started getting our vaccine on sugar cubes, I got lucky: they didn't call my name. I was sitting in Mr. McKee's History class reflecting on my good fortune when Beverly McClain (who was always so theatrical) came back from the nurse's station rubbing her arm. I fainted dead away and fell out of my desk. Mr. McKee picked me up and carried me to the teacher's lounge where the smoke gradually brought me back to consciousness..

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/rocket-scientist.html

KAWLIGA: The next thing I remember, I was lying on Lee Roadand I must have been there a while because traffic was backed up in both directions. A stranger was kneeling beside me asking if I was all right. Another man was holding Kawliga’s reins and the horse was bleeding from scratches on the side that he had fallen on. One of my shoes was twenty feet down the road…

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/kawliga.html

SADDLING KAWLIGA: I argued that my sister couldn’t handle our liveliest horse, Kawliga, but daddy thought I was just being selfish. He forced me to saddle the horse for her, and Ronda rode out of sight down the twisting gravel road. Minutes later, as Dad was lecturing me about 'talking back,' we heard the thunder of hoofbeats and turned to see Kawliga headed our way, bucking and kicking at the saddle that dangled beneath his stomach. For all we knew, Ronda was lying dead on the road, but the search for her would have to wait. Daddy picked up a tree limb…

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/saddling-kawliga.html

RUNAWAY: Mr. Bill walked right under the tree. “Hey, Rusty! Where’s Randy? Where’s Randy, boy?” I expected Rusty to look straight up at me and bark, but he bounded away and Mr. Bill followed, possibly thinking they were having a Lassie moment and that Rusty was going to show him which well I had fallen into.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/runaway.html

CARAVAN TO COVINGTON: On a Sunday night during a fire-and-brimstone sermon, my dad suddenly stopped preaching and pointed at the whispering, snickering boys sitting close to me on the back pew. He called them out—not directly, but by proxy:“Brother Randy, come up here and sit on this front bench!” I decided to defy him. The devil made me do it.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/caravan-to-covington.html

THE BIRD: To hear him tell it, this simple trick was helping him grow underarm, chest and pubic hair like Sasquatch…

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/bird.html

HIT BY A CAR: I had heard that preacher’s daughters were “fast” –which sounded ominous—and I would never have gone into the woods with one, but Diane was not, technically, a preacher’s daughter. Her granddad was preaching a revival for us …

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/hit-by-car.html

FORTY CONDOMS: I caught a glimpse, through the bathroom door, of the condom machine. Which made the back of my neck heat up. My skin tingled, my heart felt weird. As did the pit of my stomach. I let go the 40 quarters in my pockets and they jingled embarrassingly as I rushed into Holden’s bathroom and locked the door behind me.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/03/forty-condoms.html

GRAND THEFT AUTO: The evangelist told everyone in the tabernacle to stand and lift their hands to Heaven and when my mother did so, I lifted the car keys from her purse. Then I invited a girl on a date.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/grand-theft-auto.html

DAREDEVIL: While a church service was going on, I used a pocket knife to carve scratches into my arm—scratches shaped like letters of the alphabet, letters that comprised a girl’s initials. It made a bloody mess, but after scabbing over it was a lovely tribute to a girl.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/daredevil.html

THE SHIMMY-SHE-WOBBLE: The only thing for good little boys and girls to do on a date night, other than go to church orsit in the living room with her parents, was to go park by the river and "watch the submarine races." This was obviously a horrible sin, but I figured it would get overturned someday like so many of the others and I wanted to be ahead of the curve.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/hokey-pokey-shimmy-she-wobble-and-other.html

HOW I WAS RUN OUT OF COVINGTON: I don’t know what a long, deep kiss sounds like on the radio, but WARB’s audience heard one that day when, in the middle of my newscast, I turned off the wrong mic--the one that was never on in the first place--and kissed Sherry. The live mic was just inches from our lips.Poor Bobby Bradley, who was running the control board, squeezed his head between his hands and grimaced—I could see him through the soundproof window. But I thought he was just trying to crack me up.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-i-was-run-out-of-covington.html

SIX MONTHS AT MOST: After an emotionally draining worship service, our members seemed to dread crossing the threshold into the outer world, and so they moved up the aisle at the slowest possible pace, everyone trying to find something to say to everyone else. “I guess you heard that Brother Reynolds’ son is going to marry that little Jenkins girl.”“Isn’t she a little young?” “They both are.” “I give 'em six months at most.”

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/six-months-at-most.html

PERMISSION TO MARRY A FAMOUS WRITER: Me, suddenly chicken-hearted, "Honest, ya'll, I never touched her."Sherry held my hand and wrinkled her cute nose at me. "Yes, you did, you big liar!"

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

CRAFTY AS A FOX?

2011-03-02T22:08:00.077-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

The Reynolds' invaded England in 1022. We were Norsemen which, I guess, explains why all our babies are so blonde. We made it to Virginia in 1622 and then, in 1799, to Hall County, Georgia, where stray remnants of the family still reside. Wikipedia says the Reynolds family has always been known for large foreheads--say what!?! I'm even more puzzled by other sources that say Reynolds means "crafty as a fox" because I'm not entirely certain that we've lived up to that definition...

1955: The first time I ever poured out my heart to a woman in writing, I was six. She was fifty. But the age difference didn't bother me. My dad had rented a typewriter and I was overwhelmed with a desire to type my heart out to Miss Lokey.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/letter-to-miss-lokey.html

1956: I throw myself to the ground. Rolling over and over, disturbing several of Papa's newly-plowed rows, I get the cool red soil all over me. I lick my lips and taste it. Not bad.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/plowing-till-twilight.html

1957: I doubt we've ever again been as carefree as we were then, pulling little fish out of the water one after the other, keeping Papa busy baiting our hooks while Strick yelled, "I got me a big one, boys" tugging his rod back and forth to dislodge his lure from the rocks.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/strick.html

1958: When my baby sisters fretted, Mama Maude rocked them in front of the coal-burning stove and softly sang, "Bye oh baby bunting, Papa's gone a-hunting, to catch a rabbit skin to wrap my baby in." I was always first to greet Papa when he came home from the mill in the afternoon because I wanted to see if this was the day he had finally caught that rabbit skin. I was too big to rock so Mama Maude controlled me by telling me there was a monster named Babbo in the closet waiting for me to be bad so he could jump out and eat me. Well, he could wait till hell froze over, I was never going to be bad at Mama Maude's house. http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/11/mama-maude-remembrance.html

1966: She bathed me with her eyes, bemused, as if I were some harmless alien creature with whose care she had just been entrusted.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

1974: If the Braves weren't on TV, H.R. would tell me stories for the book I wanted to write about him. He told me about working at the sawmill when he was just a child; about the time one of his brothers stabbed him in the chest and Minnie rubbed soot from the fireplace in it to stop the bleeding; rebuilding Miami after a hurricane hit; his life as a prize fighter; being a detective in Chicago; facing down the vigilantes who tried to stop his tent revival; and taking off his shoes on a city street and giving them to a man who said he couldn't come to church because he didn't have any decent shoes.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/09/little-house-on-appling-road.html

1974: Every Labor Day from the 1940s into the '80s, members of the Reynolds family came from all over the country to celebrate my great-grandmother's birthday. There were hundreds of Reynolds' and their in-laws at these events, and I didn't see how she could possibly remember them all. Sometimes the look in her eyes told me she was remembering who wasn't there.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/05/homecoming.html

1984: Mama Maude and Katrina thought the noises they heard each night were made by someone trying to break into the house. They never paused to ask themselves why they should be afraid of a burglar so incompetent that he tried to break in every night but never succeeded. The women thought their lives were in danger so they called my Uncle Wint to come protect them. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: when he showed up with a loaded handgun, their lives really were in danger!

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/02/wint.html

1985: Ryan said, "Daddy, you work more than you fish." And, damned, if he wasn't right! We decided to correct that imbalance.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/daddy-you-work-more-than-you-fish.html

1988: The only storm Katrina was ever in was life and she rode it out laughing in its face...except for that last Thanksgiving... looking at me like that... as if telling me goodbye... or thanking me for being her lookout.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-katrina.html

1992: With little Jacob gone, who'll French-kiss the dogs and who'll be the test pilot for the rocking chair that now sits idle on the living-room tarmac?

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/10/with-jacob-gone-1992.html

2002: My mother was so heavily medicated as she lay dying that it's a miracle she could say anything at all. But she opened her eyes and gathered her thoughts and said an odd, sweet thing.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/10/violets-last-words-to-me.html

2005: Sherry's doctor wouldn't let her work at all, so she spent her days with grandchildren and her nights sleeping in the carport with mice running back and forth across the covers. There were mice in every box and every pile of clothes on the carport floor. A mouse fell into our coin jar and rattled the pennies all night. Sherry had nightmares about mice and told me she couldn't stand it anymore.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-sister-is-stubborn-as-mule.html

2006: Dear God, I apologize for not showing up in church lately, but I'm not sure which one is Yours. The last time I went it seemed like I was in the wrong place. It was a fabulous church building with a lovely lobby and in that lobby on a golden easel was a life-size portrait of George W. Bush. Not You. Not Jesus. Not Uncle Sam. Not Pastor. They were worshiping George W. Bush, depicted with a cross on his shoulder and an American flag on the cross. It gave me the heebie-jeebies.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/10/dear-god-please-say-hello-to-marylouise.html

2007: Mama Maude would have been overjoyed to meet her great-great-grandchildren (the Randy & Sherry--excuse me, I mean, the Pop and Shay-Shay--grandchildren), but she left the planet before they arrived.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/treehouse-full-of-miracles-all-my.html

1934: Three-year-old Gene memorized his mama's Bible stories and, one afternoon, puffing on a stogie he'd found on the ground, he pointed a finger at the card-players and gave them hell for smoking and gambling. That got such a laugh that he eagerly repeated it the next day, standing on the porch steps, chomping on a cigar, holding a Sears-Roebuch catalog in his hands like a Bible, quoting scripture and cussing like a loom-fixer. Everyone agreed that he was going to be a hell of a preacher when he grew up.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/09/hell-of-preacher.html

WINT

2011-02-19T14:36:00.017-06:00

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 ·
Diana Taylor That was lovely. I loved that man! He could always make me smile.
February 20 at 7:10am ·
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
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...

THE MADAGASCAR HISSING COCKROACH

2011-02-15T09:56:00.021-06:00

By Randy Reynolds

When I became disgusted with living in a migrant worker cabin in an orange grove in central Florida, managing an AM radio station with no potential for growth, I decided to apply for a job in the radio market I least respected and in which I thought I could have the greatest impact: Alexandria, Louisiana.

After my success in Monroe, Louisiana—a similar size market that, like Alexandria, had 13 radio stations and a stagnant economy—I thought that if I ever got a chance to manage in Alexandria, I’d set that market on its ear. And so I looked up the name of the owner of KZMZ-FM (a powerful station with a signal that could be heard in almost every parish of Louisiana) and, not knowing that he was deceased, wrote him a letter.

His widow, in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, had no clue what planet she was on, much less that she was in a fight with her church over who was to inherit her husband’s oil wells and broadcast properties. The judge in the succession battle bent over backward for the church, even allowing members to search the dead man’s home and take apart some walls looking for secret compartments, but no new will was discovered and the widow with the vacant windows got everything.

The judge appointed an executor for the estate. The executor hired a consultant from Washington. The consultant studied the market and decided that he needed one Randy Reynolds to manage the big radio station in Alexandria. But, in those pre-Internet days, Randy Reynolds couldn’t be found.

That’s when my letter to the dead man arrived on his desk.

“I’ve been searching for you all over the country,” said the consultant.

That seemed logical to me. I knew I was the best at what I did, despite the fact that as we spoke, I was sitting on the floor of a living room that had no couch in my shack in the orange grove.

There had been some articles about me in Radio & Records and Sound Management. My station had had some of the highest ratings in the nation (for mid-sized markets) in 1986 & 1987. I had fought the ratings giant Arbitron so successfully in 1988 that they had had to pull their Monroe ratings and recalculate. Sales-wise, my Monroe station had posted year-to-year increases of up to 100%, increases that came directly off the books of the competition.

When the consultant had tried to buy us, he had seen those numbers and learned a few things about Randy Reynolds—most significantly, that I was (as the Monroe owner said in his recommendation,) “… the epitome of today’s ultra-competitive radio manager.”

We met at the Atlanta airport, the executor, the consultant and I, and they told me what they wanted most of all was someone who could turn the tables on the biggest, baddest bully on the block in Alexandria—the station known as the Q.

They said: “We put out some bumper stickers and deejays from the Q collected them and stuck them to the back door of KZMZ. It sealed the door shut and our people couldn’t get out.”

And: “When we do a remote, they bring the Q remote van to our location and broadcast live, for free, ridiculing us for the size of our crowd.”

And: “When we run Louisiana Tech football games, the Q’s deejays go on the air and say, ‘Quick, if you want to hear what a real rock’n’roll radio station sounds like, turn over to KZMZ right now!’ And then people turn to us and hear the game and go right back to the Q. They’ve made us a laughingstock.”

And (most importantly): “Randy, we want you to do to them what they’ve been doing to us.”

Ironically, five years later (in 1993,) when the Q hired me as VP, Station Manager and Sales Manager for the four stations under their roof, they used almost the same words: “Randy, we want you to come do for us what you did to us.” (But that’s another story.)

I renamed KZMZ “Power 96.9”. I got rid of the druggy deejays I had inherited and brought in some real professionals, including a few guys who had worked for me in Monroe.

We turned Power 96.9 into a sales- and ratings-powerhouse and gave the Q a taste of their own medicine. I gave $96.09 to the person who could make the biggest ball out of Q bumper stickers, so our listeners went all over the city collecting Q stickers for the Q-Ball contest. One little boy with more-than-average chutzpah even went to the Q studios and got all the bumper stickers from their counter. A station exec furiously grabbed the stickers back and tried to escort the kid to the front door, but they stumbled and the kid claimed he fell down the steps. He came over to our station and told the heart-wrenching (!) story of how the people at the Q were mean to him.

We established a litmus test for new salespeople: they had to put Power 96.9 bumper stickers on the Q van and the Q owners’ cars before I would hire them.

The Q’s mascot was a gorilla, so we gave $96.09 to the person who could draw the best picture of us defeating a gorilla and then we published the gruesome entries.

Not everything revolved around the Q, though. We needed a part-timer, so we gave away the job in a contest.

A drunk superior court judge running for reelection stopped to relieve himself in the middle of the street one night and a cop caught him and called it in but didn't arrest him. At the time, Janie's Got A Gun by Aerosmith was a big hit on our station. We changed the song to Judgie's Gotta Pee and one of my jocks sang it and it became a smash hit! What could the other stations do to compete with totally local/outrageous/funny stuff like that? Nothing.

The free world was ostracizing South Africa and we, for what it was worth, used the phrase “Free Mandela” on the air at least once every hour.

It sounded like we were on a mission—numerous missions at once—“Free Mandela,” “Beat the Gorilla,” “The Q-Ball Contest,” “Win a Job,” "Judgie's Gotta Pee," “Bring us a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.”

Huge hissing cockroaches were, according to the news media, spreading through America after entering the country in shipments of bananas and oranges at seaports such as New Orleans. Although we didn’t say that any had been reported in our area, we offered $96.09 to the first listener who could bring us a live one in a jar. And a soldier from Fort Polk did it. We had a good time with it on the morning show—the cockroach hissed and we oohed and aaahed about the size of the thing and its ferociousness and the soldier collected his $96.09 and carried the cockroach back to the lab he’d borrowed it from at the fort.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and held some Americans hostage, our News Director Clifton Riley (who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew everybody in the world—think two degrees of Kevin Bacon) got the only interview in America with the Iraqi ambassador to Washington.

Our ratings doubled, our income tripled, the old lady with Alzheimer’s died, other people wanted to hire me away, the consultant warned me it would be dangerous to mention this to the board, which had reneged on a promise to invest me with part ownership in the station…

So, in due course, I accepted an offer to become manager (and part-owner) of some stations in Texas…which is a whole other helluva story that hurts my head to think about….

(Photo: The best Newsman I ever had: my great friend Clifton Riley. I hired him at three different stations. His news-writing flowed like poetry. He did a wicked Ronald Reagan impression and so did our deejay Steve Aldrich. Together, they were "The Reagan Brothers"--and they put the bumbling old President into hilarious perspective for our Central Louisiana audience.)

---------------------------------------------------------------

Later…after 96.9, after my Texas misadventures and after coming back to manage four stations for three years in Alexandria…I became a Morning Man again…(with my imaginary podnuh I.B. Flyin’)

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/02/aaaaaiiiiiyyyyyyyyyiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee.html

Earlier…as gangsters would phrase it, I “made my bones” in Monroe…

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/magic.html

I worked at 30-something stations and moved 59 times. (I changed houses more than jobs because every time my station got more successful I moved to ever-better lodgings and spent ever-more money and—a major factor in my story—aroused ever-increasing interest from the I.R.S. ) I probably won’t live long enough to tell about each stop on my journey…and it would certainly be boring to tell it in chronological order, so I’m doing as Mark Twain did—telling whatever part of the story interests me most on a given day.

"Aaaaiiiyyyiiieee! "

2011-02-12T12:56:00.013-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

Like Wolfman Jack eating a popsicle while his voice was going out over the airwaves in American Graffitti, I pre-recorded my voice in advance of the Randy Reynolds Show each morning in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s on Oldies 104. Unlike the Wolfman, though, I didn’t sit there eating popsicles while my pre-recorded voice was entertaining the audience. I used the recording as a second entity on the show—the tape and I talked back and forth to each other.

I came in early each day, usually around 2 a.m., to write and record I.B.’s bits in a wild voice with a Cajun accent. By showtime—6 a.m.—I’d have downed the first six of the ten cups of Community Coffee I would drink each morning.

I.B. talked about real things--expose's that I got from tipsters and whistle blowers from all walks of life and from every level of government in Rapides Parish. For reasons sometimes selfless, sometimes self-serving, my sources flooded me with tips, many of which—the ones I could verify--ended up on the air.

I spent almost all my waking hours for several years verifying-- making sure that every word out of I.B.’s mouth was true, hence the 10 cups of coffee per day and the nights of writing till midnight and going to work two hours later to record our expose’s and/or jokes.

I started each report with a helicopter sound-effect. Then came I.B.'s trademark yell, "Aaaaiiiyyyiiieee! " and we went into our schtick and exposed another boondoggle… 5 days per week, 51 weeks per year, (52 weeks one year when I refused to take a vacation and worked 364 days before taking off the last day of the year.)

The eye in the sky... Most mornings, in the late 1990's and early 2000's, lawyers and public officials gather around someone's car outside the Rapides and Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, courthouses. With car doors open and radios blaring full blast, they listen to I.B. Flyin' on the Randy Reynolds Show. They'll be talking about it all day, a common greeting in the courthouse being, "Hey, did you hear what Ol' I.B. said about you this morning?"

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/03/eye-in-sky-ib-flyin.html

One cop taught me some moves...in case the mayor attacked me physically. The sheriff called me into his office and gave me a carry permit (and waived the fee) and sent me to an insurance agent who gave me a free liability policy that went with the permit. A store owner who was an ex-cop gave me a handgun to carry at all times. Cops met me at clandestine locations, in their homes, at lawyer's offices and at police stations to explain one injustice or another that I could use on the news or turn into a comedy bit. It was all pretty dramatic stuff, but funny, too. One cop--who had a lot of musical ability--recorded some songs about the mayor's misdeeds and I played them on the air to great acclaim (and ratings.) Some of the misdeeds of the mayor (and others) I turned into I.B. Flyin bits. Others I used on the news. Many qualified for use both ways because the news was so funny in Central Louisiana in those days that it was hard to tell the difference between news and comedy.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/locked-and-loaded.html

Me and I.B Flyin and Mr. Winky and Plucker the Duck... It's week seven of the 13-week ratings period and my imaginary co-hosts and I are in rare form. My jokes are funny, my listeners are funny; even the wooden duck-call known to listeners as Plucker-the-Duck and the plastic squeak-toy I call Mr. Winky are in rare form today.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/03/tallywhacker-bridge.html

A morning show like no other... behind the scenes.“You comin’, too, Randy? You a good man. You deserve to get out of this place… and so does I.B. and Plucker and Mr. Winky and Shirley Q. Liquor..”

In Boo’s condition, it would do no good to remind him that I.B., Plucker and Mr. Winky are all just different versions of me—figments of my imagination presented on my show as separate individuals—and that Shirley Q. Liquor is an Internet Comedian.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/03/snakes-spaceships-and-naked-deejays.html

Monroe... Creating the best station that ever was...
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/magic.html

Monroe... Movin' on up...
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/dream-charts.html

Alexandria... Doing unto others...

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/02/madagascar-hissing-cockroach.html

...........

GRAND THEFT AUTO

2011-01-28T22:10:00.013-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

The first caper of my car theft career was a simple matter. It happened in Gainesville, Georgia, 1952. I was almost three. My dad was 21. He left me alone in the car with the motor running while he darted into the dry cleaners about fifteen feet from the curb. His last words to me were, “Don’t touch the gear.”

As soon as he was gone, I touched the gear and it was game on.

As Dad picked up his suits another customer came in and said, “Whoever owns that car outside better hurry—it’s headed down the hill!”

Dad ran out of the laundry and saw the ’52 Buick traveling backward down Myrtle Street with me standing in the front seat gripping the steering wheel. Face to face with me, he ran full speed but the distance between us lengthened as the car hurtled down the hill.

The chase came to an abrupt end when I made a sharp right turn onto Main Street, ran over the curb, bounced the Buick off a guy-wire and came to rest against a telephone pole.

My next adventure in a car that didn’t belong to me was more a case of fraud than grand theft auto. I lied to get my Uncle Wint to lend me his car. He had moved from Georgia to Pine Knoll, the Lee Road version of a country club. I walked from the parsonage on Kenzy Fitzgerald road, all the way to Wint’s rented house near the second hole of the five-hole (?) golf course. I gave him a cockamamie story about how Daddy would have lent me his car but he had to see someone in the hospital.

Wint couldn’t have believed a word I was saying but he just smiled that sly smile of his and handed over the keys to his ’64 Buick wagon.

The party of 14 and 15 year olds was just getting underway when the phone rang. It was my dad. His instructions were crystal clear and his tone left no room for argument. I considered disobeying him, but as soon as I hung up the phone, my fantasy (Lydia King) asked me to dance and that scared me so bad on so many levels that I obeyed my dad and got out of there.

The next time I stole a car it really was grand theft auto. My cousin Stanley Appling and I met two girls at the Georgia Camp Meeting and had a great time sitting in someone’s unlocked car throughout the evening service. (Which was sort of like stealing a car, though we didn't take it anywhere. We just sat in it.) Stanley and his girl took the front seat, me and mine had the back where we fell in love over suicide snow-cones (a mixture of all flavors.) Our parting was sad when the service was over, but I promised her I’d come to see her the following day.

We were staying with my Dad’s folks in Gainesville, Georgia, and the girl lived an hour’s drive away in Doraville. My plan was to borrow my Aunt Katrina’s car, and I pitched the deal while she was hanging out the wash on the clothesline between the smokehouse and Papa’s barn. I said, “Do you remember all those times you smoked Salems and I kept a lookout for you?”

She narrowed her eyes against the smoke of the Salem in her mouth and laughed.

“Well, now you can pay me back,” I said. “If you’ll loan me your car, it’ll make us even.”

She wasn’t about to do it, but she wanted to get the whole story. “Why do you need a car?”

“I want to go see this girl in Doraville.”

“Shit, that’s fifty miles, honey! You can’t drive that far.”

I told her that I was disappointed in her, went back to the house, sneaked Daddy’s car keys from his suit pants hanging on the back of the guest room door and stole his car.

Having never driven in traffic any heavier than that of rural St. Tammany Parish, I should have been traumatized by the crowded expressways, but I was in love and mere traffic couldn't keep me away from my girl.

Daddy, working with the State Patrol and my cousin Stanley, soon figured out which girl I was going to see. He called me there to tell me the State Patrol was on the way to arrest me, but if I could get myself out of there before they arrived, and if I would drive straight back to Gainesville, he wouldn’t press charges. The girl and her parents were upset by this time, so I lit out for Gainesville and turned myself in to my dad.

The punishment he meted out didn’t discourage me from stealing his car again a few weeks later at the Louisiana camp meeting. The evangelist told everyone in the tabernacle to stand and lift their hands to Heaven and when my mother did so, I lifted the car keys from her purse. Then I invited a girl named Gayla on a date.

We sneaked into the car from different directions and drove out of the campground with the lights off and Gayla crouching low in the seat. We parked for a little smooching and groping, but nothing that rose to the level of what I had heard Karen Goodwin describe in a speech in Miss Hutcheson’s 10^th Grade English class as “necking.” I think her speech was called “The Art of Necking” and I remember that she got an “A.” Gayla and I didn’t go nearly as far as the examples in Karen’s speech. We covered very few bases at all—just enough to make us thirsty, so we cruised on down to Frances Barker’s drive-in and drank root beer floats and then snuck back onto the campground.

We got there at the end of the sermon when some people were shouting in the aisles and others were running to the altar. My mother’s hands were raised in praise again and her eyes were closed, so I had no problem slipping in beside her unnoticed and returning the keys to her purse.

The only other car I ever stole was when Daddy tried to ground me and took my keys away. I jerked the keys out of his hand, ran outside and started up the Volkswagen he was allowing me to buy from him. He got his hand on the car door, but I released the clutch and spun away on the wet grass of the front yard. He gave chase on foot and caught me twice more before the VW hit its stride.

I drove it to work at WARB where, in due time, a deputy showed up and talked for as long as it took for one side of Frank Sinatra’s September Of My Years album to play. I told him nobody but the FBI could arrest me because I was an announcer on duty at a federally licensed radio station. He said that could be arranged, but went on to preach a nice little sermon about obeying my father. I was especially touched by his description of what jail would be like, and—as far as I can recall—that was the last time I ever stole a car.

--------------------------------

Two years later, at Youth Camp, I saw Gayla standing with a girl named Sherry and as I walked toward them, the sun, the moon and all the stars fell on me...

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

THE BIRD

2011-01-26T06:18:00.011-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

(Photo: Uncle Bobby, 1955)

I was a first-grader the first time I saw my teenaged Uncle Bobby naked in the bathtub. The sight of him sent me running through the house with my first news bulletin: “Mother, mother, Bobby’s got a mustache!”

To my surprise, she greeted my news with a laugh instead of horror and explained that Bobby was not a freak, that everybody has hair down there—which was news to me, because I sure didn’t have any yet. I found out how that worked five years later when Kenny Fussell explained to the sixth grade boys at Lee Road School that the only way to grow body hair was to shave the area where hair was desired. Every time it was shaved, he said, it would grow in thicker. To hear him tell it, this simple trick was helping him grow underarm, chest and pubic hair like Sasquatch and he exhorted us—if we wanted to keep up with him—to shave those areas. I don’t recall how many times I did so, nor do I know if following his advice is why my chest hair is not exactly in the Robin Williams category. (Have you ever seen that freak?) Mine is more like Tarzan’s—which is my wife’s nickname for me. (Gee thanks, Kenny.)

Uncle Bobby spent a few months in our household when I was six and he was fourteen. He had gotten into some kind of trouble, or wasn’t getting along with his parents, or something, so he’d been sent to live with his older sister Violet and brother-in-law Gene and their little family until things blew over. After staying with us a while, he must have been relieved to get back to whatever trouble or tribulation had driven him from home, because I didn’t exactly make life easy for him.

I was his shadow. His paparazzi. My reporting at the time included:

“Daddy, Bobby’s smoking cigarettes behind the church and he smokes Winstons.”

“Daddy, Bobby’s cussing—he said dookey.”

“Daddy, Bobby says there’s such a thing as a pink elephant.”

My biggest scoop was showing my daddy the bird. Daddy was lying in bed with Rick and me after Mother had sent him in to calm us down. He had just mesmerized us with an Uncle Remus story and we were lying there talking about first one thing and then another, when I felt compelled to tell him something he didn’t know. I stuck out my middle finger and used my other hand to bend back the fingers next to it and said, “Do you know what this means?”

He paused. “No. What?”

“Funk,” I said.

He sat bolt upright. “Who told you that?”

One of my friends across the street was the guilty culprit (this was years before I met Kenny Fussell) but I didn’t want to get my friend in trouble so I said, “Bobby.”

“Violet, come in here!” shouted Daddy.

Poor Bobby had no way of defending himself; he and his mustache and his Winstons were gone a few days later.

-------------------------------------

My mother's brother, Ensign Bobby Cecil Appling was the first official “rocket scientist” in our family. Bobby wanted to be a fighter pilot, but flying made him dizzy and he became a rocket scientist instead. http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/rocket-scientist.html

HOW I WAS RUN OUT OF COVINGTON

2011-01-18T00:24:00.015-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

Mr. Rick, my boss at the radio station in Covington, Louisiana, promised me more hours in the spring of 1967 after I told him I was going to marry his 16 year old neighbor from Tangipahoa Parish. But more hours at $1.60 wasn't quite enough. To support a wife and attend Southeastern Louisiana College, I needed 15 cents more.

And so it came to pass that two weeks before my June wedding date, I went in and asked for a raise. I don’t know if it was what I said or the way I said it, or if Mr. Rick was just having a bad day, but he changed my life forever when I told him I needed that raise. He slid a Jim Reeves album back into its cover, replaced it on the top shelf, turned to me and said, “You’re fired. Just get on out of here. Go work someplace else.”

Being fired just for asking for a raise was ironic, considering all the firing offenses I had gotten away with since becoming a deejay at the age of 15.

He didn’t fire me, for instance, the time I let Bobby Bradley run the control board in the main studio while I read the news with Sherry at my side in the other studio (the one the preachers used.) There were two mics in Studio B and Bobby had accidentally turned on Mic #2. I thought I was on Mic 1. Therefore, in the middle of a story about the war in Vietnam when I turned off Mic 1 and coughed, Bobby waved his arms to signal that I was still on the air—Mic 2 was live. But I didn’t know what he meant. I read a few more lines, cut off Mic 1—and, again, not realizing that Mic 2 was picking up every sound—I sneezed. (The Yu cologne with which I doused myself often had that effect.) Sherry, who was sitting as close to me as anyone could sit without being Siamese twins, looked puzzled.

“They can’t hear me,” I explained. “See when I push this button right here, it cuts off the mic."

Bobby went crazy in the other studio, making faces, slashing his fingers across his throat and waving his arms.

I read some more of the story, “General Westmoreland said…” whatever-whatever… and cut off Mic 1 again.

“See, now we’re off the air again. All they hear is silence, so they just think I’m pausing for emphasis. They have no idea what’s really going on.”

Sherry watched Bobby having a conniption at the main control board. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure,” I said. “Kiss me.”

By this time, only a few weeks before our wedding day, I didn’t have to ask her twice. I don’t know what a long deep kiss sounds like on the radio, but WARB’s audience heard one that day. Poor Bobby Bradley squeezed his head between his hands and grimaced—I could see him through the soundproof window. But I thought he was just trying to crack me up.

I turned on the irrelevant Mic 1 again and read another story, then turned it off to smooch some more. “I love you, Sherry.” "I love you more, Randy.”

Bobby flung down his headphones, lurched out of his chair and tapped on the window that separated the studios. Veins were popping out on his face as he pointed to Mic 2 and screamed something that I couldn’t hear through the soundproof glass.

I looked down at Mic #1 that I’d been turning on and off. I looked over at Mic #2 in front of Sherry. Bobby was pointing to Mic 2. Understanding dawned: I pointed to Mic 2 and mouthed “Is this one on?” Bobby nodded vigorously.

My heart sank. I rolled my chair a few feet away from Sherry and tried to read the rest of the newscast in the most serious voice I could muster, but she rolled her chair closer and tickled me and nuzzled my neck. She tried to cut off Mic 1 and talk to me, but I slapped her hand and continued reading World News. Sherry doesn't give up easily, so she kept trying to reach the mic button and I kept shaking my head "no" for the rest of the newscast.

That night, my father-in-law-to-be said, “I heard your news this afternoon.”

I froze. He didn’t say another word, but I’ll never forget the look he gave me.

Mr. Rick never mentioned it, so maybe he didn’t hear it, and maybe nobody ever told him about it. I don’t really know, because—except for one occasion—we never spoke again after he fired me for asking for a raise.

That one occasion was two years later (1969) when Hurricane Camille tore up the Gulf Coast and I called him from the 19^th Floor of the Prudential Building in Jacksonville,Florida, where I was News Director for the city’s #1 station, WVOJ. I asked him to give me a report on the storm and he gave me a nice second-hand report that I used on my news. Calling on him to be my storm reporter was my way of showing him that I was doing all right—News Director at a major market station; a very satisfying version of that far-in-the-future scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts goes back into the store where the sales girls had dissed her and says, "Big mistake. BIG mistake" and flaunts her new clothes. But I wasn't just flaunting—I was also letting Mr. Rick know that there were no hard feelings... that it might have been crappy to (almost) implode my whole world two weeks before my wedding over a request for a 15 cent raise, but, hey, dude, look at me now ! It's all good!

It hadn’t interfered with the wedding—Sherry and I got married on the selected date with no job, no savings, no cash in our pockets except for $50 Mama Maude had sent me. We had a car (and a car payment) and I had a dad who had been burning up the phone lines calling stations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia to get me a job. (He may have had visions of an unemployed son and a 7^th child—Sherry—moving into the Shepherd’s Fold parsonage.)

My dad’s a heckuva salesman: against all odds, he talked the CBS affiliate in Atlanta (WBIE) into giving me an audition. Four days after the wedding, New Orleans honeymoon complete, I went to that audition and was hired on the spot to be their News Director. I was 18... and soon Dr. Martin Luther King’s people were calling my people and… well, you already know that story.

I'll never know the man I would have become if I'd spent my entire life in Covington—as I had assumed that I would do. Once Mr. Rick sent me packing, I was forced to become someone entirely different from who I thought I was going to be.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

...Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)

LOCKED AND LOADED

2011-01-13T08:48:00.006-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

The mayor pulled his gun, crouched behind his car door and yelled at the people in the car ahead of him, “Get out with your hands up! This is your mayor speaking!”

The mayor pointed a gun at people on many occasions, including at least once at city hall when he threatened a councilman.

Early in the mayor’s term, a city councilman who often voted against him was shot to death through the screen door of his motel—no robbery involved. The killer shot him down and left. Nobody was ever accused of that crime, but never again did a councilman stand up to the mayor. Whatever the mayor wanted, they voted for it unanimously. And when he spoke, the councilmen nodded non-stop like bobble-head dolls in the back window of a moving vehicle. On my morning radio show, I dubbed them “The bobbing-head city council.”

He ran roughshod over his police department, too. When he told a cop in the city parking lot to stop whistling, the cop disobeyed. “You just ended your career,” said the mayor, who subsequently had the sergeant fired. (No wonder cops and ex-cops became my best anonymous sources of stories about the mayor!)

He liked to prove to his policemen that he was tougher than they were, so he challenged them to impromptu wrestling matches behind the police department and beat all comers.

The mayor and his sons often tailed police officers through the night to make sure they were making their rounds. To prove this was happening, some off-duty cops took me with them and we tailed the mayor’s sons tailing the cops for more than four hours.

He required the police department to do a safety check of his property each night at 2 a.m. He called his home “The Eagle’s Nest” and the inspecting officer was expected to call in, “The Eagle’s Nest is secure.” If the mayor didn't hear this call at the expected hour on his bedside scanner, he'd get on the horn to the police department and berate the officer on duty.

Such antics from the gun-totin’ mayor were great fodder for my morning radio show (and occasionally for the front page of the newspaper.) But the cops warned me that he was a violent and dangerous man, and that I had better be prepared for a confrontation. When I tried to laugh this off, a prominent local businessman who was an ex-cop, brought me a handgun and told me to keep it with me at all times. An officer from a neighboring jurisdiction gave me some basic self-defense lessons because he was certain the mayor was going to take me down the next time he saw me.

I was handling all this in good-humor until the morning on the bridge when the mayor’s son pulled up beside me and pointed a pistol at me through his window. I pointed the borrowed Glock at him and he sped up and disappeared into the pre-dawn darkness. He’ll never know how scared I was and how close I came to shooting him.

From then on, a “locked and loaded” routine was the opening of my morning show. My co-host and I would go through a checklist: “Headphones… check.” “Microphone …check.” “Oldies…check.” “Walther P22…check.” (Here we’d noisily shove in the clip.) “Glock 9…check.” (More noise.) “12-guage…check.” (We’d chamber a round right next to the mic.) “All right! We’re locked and loaded, let’s get this show on the road!”

That was just to let the mayor know we were ready.

When my co-host left on vacation, my father-in-law (a preacher who happens to really like guns) sat at the front desk each morning with a loaded shotgun. Just in case.

Though the verbal war stayed heated—me holding the mayor to account, the mayor insisting we were lying about him—no physical altercation occurred that year except for the mayor’s son kicking me in the shins at a banquet… someone slashing three of my car tires… and the mayor yelling at me outside a courtroom.

My show got a big boost in the ratings, the 7-term mayor was beaten in the next election, and—after an ad agency executive commented on the gun in my belt when she dropped in to visit the morning show—the station owner suggested we stop bringing guns to work.

A couple of years later when the Legislative Auditor made some untrue allegations about the ex-mayor, I came to his defense. Although I’m sure he never forgave me for exposing and ridiculing his foibles, and I certainly never turned my back when I was in the same room with him, on the air, we carried on like long-lost friends.

Some folks didn’t understand how I could be so friendly to a character I had derided for being so bad, but that explanation was easy: I was just sticking with the truth and the truth sometimes changes sides.

AUDACIOUS

2011-01-07T05:04:00.011-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

In the fall of 1960, Champion Bailey Rogers—Old C.B. to his 6th grade students—announced that our class would be the entertainment at the next meeting of the Lee Road PTA.

Lee Road Consolidated was equipped with that most modern of marvels, the mimeograph machine, and so, in due course, a page of purple spelling words was distributed to a select few students by Old C.B.

I enjoyed being in Old C.B.’s class and learning about everything except what was in our textbooks. He spent a lot of time on current events—nuclear annihilation, the Civil War (still considered a current event by the Lee Road Rebels), our governor’s recent stint in a mental asylum, the commies trying to destroy America through integration of the schools, and the Kennedy-Nixon race—(he hated them both). When he drifted off into these areas it was stimulating; mind-boggling; I loved it. If he’d tested us on these subjects, I’d have been a straight-A student, right up there with Mary Alice DuBuisson, Mary Lee Fitzgerald, Marilyn Galloway and Kenny Dutruch. But, Alas, there were no tests for current events so I was not exactly at the top of my class... which is why it surprised me when Old C.B. handed me a mimeographed sheet of spelling words and told me I would be in the bee.

He exhorted us to study hard, learn every word. "Think of how great it would be if nobody missed a word--if we didn't have any losers!"

Spelling bee sheet in hand, I raided the fridge after school that day. There was nothing in it but a lemon, some lard and something leafy that some people—not me—considered food. (I didn’t eat anything green except crabapples, plums and green M & M's.) I snatched the lemon and went outside to study—away from the four sisters, one brother, two parents and the dog.

Although studying was not a common practice for me, I had some private spots in which to do it—the normal places a boy in a large family would hide out to read library books, as I often did: on the roof of the parsonage, on a pew in the old church next door, or in the new church next door to that one; in the tung-oil tree; in the oak tree; in a neighbor’s barn loft. On this day I chose the cemetery behind the churches. It had a fence around it and that would keep Rusty, our German shepherd, from interrupting me. My sisters wouldn’t be playing there, and if my brother Ricky came over and bugged me, all I had to do was beat him up and he’d give me some privacy.

I pulled some weeds from around my favorite headstone, that of a boy named Alex who had died at the age of ten. Though I’d never known him, I felt a special connection to Alex; perhaps because we were almost the same age; maybe because I climbed on roofs and he'd been killed on one when he touched a power line while retrieving his kite. I visited his grave often, sometimes to lean against his headstone and read, sometimes just to stand there and think about what dying must feel like and whether Alex went to heaven or hell.

I settled onto the ground beside Alex and ate my lemon, peel and all, while looking over the spelling words. The sheet was hard to read. Some words were blurred, like the ink was too heavy or Old C.B. had some malformed typewriter keys. The very first word was a new one on me: A-U-D-A-O-I-O-U-S.

"I've never seen that word," I said to Alex. "Maybe it's supposed to be a C instead of an O--auda-C-ious instead of auda-O-ious."

I felt like Alex agreed with me. The word must be A-U-D-A-C-I-O-U-S.

I studied the spelling words for as long as it took me to eat the lemon, then thought ‘The heck with it’ and went to bridle my one-eyed horse Ranger to ride up the road to Johnny Johnson’s house to play with his monkey.

---

As we marched onto the stage at the PTA meeting in the gym, Old C.B. made a real good speech about how smart we were, the brightest, hardest-working students from the best sixth grade class in the parish--his.

Now I don’t know how much time Old C.B. was supposed to kill that night, but the rest of the agenda had been extremely brief, and the crowd was primed for some entertainment, so the spelling bee was probably supposed to last awhile. But it didn’t.

Old C.B. started with the A’s: “Audacious.”

I smiled. Alex and I had figured correctly.

One-by-one my six classmates tried the word and missed it. Several of them spelled it the way it had appeared on the list: “A-U-D-A-O-I-O-U-S.”

Each time Old C.B. said, “Wrong” or “That’s incorrect” the audience groaned.

When everyone but me had tried the word, Old C.B. said, “Don't any of y'all sit down yet, because if the last contestant gets it wrong, you're still in the contest. Randy: audacious.”

I spelled it. Old C.B. mumbled that I was correct. The audience applauded. He offered a little apology: “Heh-heh, our spelling bee didn’t last quite as long as we thought it would.”

And then he hustled us off the stage.

A preacher who was in the audience that night leaned over to his wife and said, “You know, that Reynolds boy is going to make something of himself someday.”

That night I spelled Audacious; later I became it.

And a mere six years later I became the son-in-law of that preacher and his wife.

BACK TO INDEX: http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-hope-you-dance.html

DAREDEVIL

2010-12-22T14:01:00.023-06:00

By Randy Reynolds

The Sunday morning worship service at the Bainbridge Church of God was over and most of the congregation—everyone except the blind man, my two friends and me—drifted toward the double doors where my Daddy, the pastor, waited to shake their hands. Brother Roy, the blind man, sat on the third pew from the front, gripping his cane, waiting for the aisles to clear. My friends and I stood behind him and to his right.

“Pinch him,” said Daniel.

“I ain’t pinching nobody,” I said.

Brother Roy cocked his head our way.

“Go ahead. He can’t see you,” said James.

“Pinch him yourself,” I said.

“It’s your turn. I took his hat last week,” said James.

“I dare you,” said Daniel.

I heard the word “dare” and something clicked. I eased over to Brother Roy who sat stock-still, listening for any disturbance of air in his vicinity. A feeling of self-satisfaction swept over me like a religious experience: I felt cleansed, sanctified, superior. I got chill bumps. My buddies snickered in the background. I reached forward…

The blind man’s hand shot out like a snake seizing its prey. He grabbed my wrist and raised it high. “Look here, everybody! You want to see what kind of boy pinches a blind man? Look here, folks! It’s Randy Reynolds!”

Everyone turned to look except my friends--(who had disappeared faster than Elijah in his chariot of fire.) I fought to get free but Brother Roy was able to hold me until Daddy got there…

…(no need to go into further specifics here)…

In Bainbridge (in the late ‘50’s) when working in the sewing factory paid more than being a maid, my mother worked in the sewing factory and hired a maid to take care of the parsonage and the five little Reynolds children. Both Mother and the maid worked long hard hours, but at the end of the week, Mother paid the maid and still had a small profit left over, so it was a good deal until she had to quit the job to give birth to baby number six. Having the maid was a good deal for Ricky and me, as well, because the maid had two sons, Jo-Jo and Charlie, who came along most days to play. And Jo-Jo was a daredevil.

When Jo-Jo jumped headfirst off the roof of the shed in our backyard, I had to do it, too. We held our arms in front of us, took a running start and flew from the roof into a stand of bamboo. We held onto those canes for dear life as they bent beneath our weight and set us on the ground. What a rush!

A couple of years later in Louisiana, my daredevil friend Richie fell out of his tree house backward onto some springs and a mattress on the ground. After I saw him do it, I did it, too, and had a religious experience in mid-air.

Richie picked up a snake that crossed our path in the woods. I thought it was the bravest act I’d ever seen so I began to pick up snakes, too.

It became a competition. Which of us would do something the other wouldn’t? Richie stuck a straight pin in his leg at church, as we sat on the back row. It went all the way into the bone, I presumed, because nothing remained visible except the pinhead. Although, I was afraid of needles (I fainted when I took a shot) I did what he did—licked the pin to make sure it was clean and stuck it into my skin, then tapped it with my finger until it was all the way in.

I’m the one who elevated the competition to carving girls’ initials in our arms. While a church service was going on, I used a pocket knife to carve scratches into my arm—scratches shaped like letters of the alphabet, letters that comprised a girl’s initials. It made a bloody mess, but after scabbing over it was a lovely tribute to a girl.

At 15, when I got my first radio job but didn’t have a car, Daddy would take me to work on Sunday mornings and drive back to his church in the country. After church, he’d loan his ’64 Chevy station wagon to guys from church (usually Richie, Willie and Rodney) and they’d drive the 8 miles to town to pick me up. On one such occasion, on our way back home with me at the wheel, we were doing over 90 miles per hour when one of the boys dared me to put it into reverse. I don’t know what possessed him to do that, but there was no dare that Randy Reynolds wouldn’t do. I dropped it into reverse and I’ll never forget the sounds and the smell, both human and mechanical. The car shimmied and shook the rest of the way home. Our story was that we were driving along and the car just started “acting up.” Daddy had no reason not to believe us.

At Lee Road Consolidated School, our principal allowed the junior high grades to get out of class to watch World Series games on a small TV set that he placed on a stool in the gym. I, a lowly seventh-grader had somehow gotten involved in a discussion with ninth-grader and star basketball player Joe King, who favored the Yankees. I bet him a quarter (that I didn’t have) that the Pirates would win. Shortly afterward, Mazerowski hit his grand slam and Joe owed me a quarter. When I went to collect he wanted to make it double-or-nothing that I couldn’t throw a Coke bottle from the bleachers on one side of the gym to the stage on the other side without breaking the bottle. I told him I thought it could be done without the bottle breaking, depending on how it was thrown, but I didn’t want to do it. I just wanted my quarter. Then he said, “I dare you.” If it was a dare, I had to do it. The gym was filled with people, but no one was on the stage. I stood up and heaved the bottle in such a way as I hoped would cause it to sail to a soft landing on the hardwood stage. The bottle broke to smithereens in front of a gym full of witnesses and I was hauled to the principal’s office. I tried to explain that it was an experiment, but the only experiment Mr. Fitzgerald was interested in was the one he applied to my backside with the paddle with the holes drilled in it.

At 17, my baseball career was ended by a dare. CHS Coach Royce Whittington had hauled us out to our practice field at the fairgrounds and told us to warm up easy. “Everybody pick a partner. Don’t throw it hard. Just warm up. Throw it slow.” We paired up to toss a few. Coach strolled around watching us play catch. “Just loosen up. Nice’n’easy.”

“Burn one in here,” said my partner Jerome.

I lobbed it to him.

He tossed it back. “Come on. Show me whatchou got! I dare you!”

He dared me?

I wound up and threw the ball with all my might. Instead of trying to catch it, he ducked and let it go over his head. Someone yelled, “Coach, look out!” Coach Whit turned just in time for the ball to hit him in the eye. He dropped like a sack of feed.

I was among the group that gathered around him, waiting for the ambulance. “Coach, it wasn’t my fault! Jerome dared me! Then he ducked!”

My throw splintered several little bones around his eye, but his vision was eventually saved and the bones were pieced back together until he looked almost normal again.

When it came time for our first game—a road trip—he said, “We have eighteen players, but we’re only taking seventeen, so someone will have to volunteer to stay.”

His eyes settled on me. I thought, Oh, no, you wouldn’t dare.

He smiled as if reading my mind. “Reynolds, thanks for volunteering."

--------------------------------------------------

BAMBOO

by Randy Reynolds

Shed deserted, to club converted. We were proud, No Girls Allowed!!! From roof, bamboo to leap into. Again, again bamboo would strain under me and my chum, and then succumb with swishing sound and set us aground. Though life today has me down to stay, though now there's such little cane to clutch, I'd love once more from that roof to soar, hit scared and queasy, and go down easy.

-------------------------------------------------------

JO-JO AND CHARLIE

by Randy Reynolds

Black folk voted Republican. White folk voted Jim Crow.

I guess their daddies had done it, which was all they seemed to know.

Our only contact with black folk was to hire one as our maid.

And with her came Jo-Jo and Charlie, her sons, with whom I played.

I invited them once to our church, stirring talk of Little Rock.

The deacons went into a frenzy and the membership went into shock.

Christians ran off the intruders. Saints stood guard at the door.

And I was admonished to never invite them back anymore.

Those boys and I drifted apart as our childhoods drifted by.

We all knew we couldn't be friends; we just didn't quite know why.

RUNAWAY

2010-12-19T08:52:00.009-06:00

By Randy Reynolds

Rusty didn’t know anything about tragedy, self-pity or how it felt to be punished unfairly. As I lurked in the woods near the home that I was leaving forever, the big old German Shepherd mix bounded around like it was just another romp in the swamp with his best friend, me. He licked my face when I settled down behind a log to write my farewell manifesto.

I brushed him aside. “Get out of here, Rusty! Go! Git!”

He settled down beside me, panting and wagging his tail while I wrote the note that would be my final communication with my family. Rusty didn’t care that I was pouring out my mistreated soul in the little notebook I always kept in my pocket. He didn’t care that I planned to sneak up to the house after dark and tie the note to Daddy’s car handle so he would know the reason I had run away and was never coming back. Rusty didn’t care that someday this note would probably be published in the St. Tammany Farmer—maybe even LOOK magazine—so I had to get it just right. My words had to make my dad sorry for what he had done and they had to make the whole world understand what it was like to be me.

Not every 14-year-old carries a notebook and pen on his person at all times; fortunately, for the tragedy at hand, I did. Until my farewell note, I had used it only to record jokes I heard in barber shops and cafes, from other kids at school or on TV—whenever I heard a good one, I wrote it in my tiny notebook.

“One Englishman to another: heard you buried your wife last week. The other one says, ‘Had to, old chap. Dead, you know.”

“A pilot comes on the intercom and announces, ‘Folks this plane is overloaded. Unless we can lighten the load we’re going to crash into the ocean.' They threw out all the luggage and the pilot says ‘We’re still overloaded.’ So a Frenchman gets up and says, ‘Viva la France!’ and jumps out. An Englishman gets up and says, ‘Long live the queen!’ And he jumps out. Then a Texan gets up and says, ‘Remember the Alamo’ and throws two Mexicans out!”

I kept a record of these jokes so I could be the life of the party. True, I didn’t go to parties, but if I ever did these jokes in my little notebook would help me be the center of attention. I would never be at a loss for words in front of a girl again, because I could always whip out my joke book and read some jokes and make her like me. Heck, I even memorized the Raven, all 14 pages of it, so I could keep the conversation going next time I was in the presence of a pretty girl who always left me tongue-tied.

But that was all in the past. Wasted effort. I no longer needed to impress the girls. My future would be dark and lonely. And it would begin as soon as I finished my farewell note to Dad, which I could have concentrated on a lot better if Rusty hadn’t been thumping the ground with his tail and looking me in the eyes as if to say, ‘Hurry up, Ran. Let’s go play.’

Darkness fell at last and I sneaked back to the house, crawling the last few yards, commando-style. With a piece of string that I’d found in my pocket—who knows what a boy will find there, or why he put it there—I tied my note to the driver-side door handle of my Dad’s tan 1964 Chevy station wagon--or so I thought--and crawled back into the woods.

In my confused state, mentally exhausted by the events of the day and my urgent need to stay tragic in the face of Rusty’s happiness, I didn’t notice that I had tied my note to the wrong make, model and color car. Mr. Bill, our church Youth Director, Scoutmaster and family friend, had stopped by the parsonage where no one knew yet that I was missing. When he departed he was able to grasp his door handle and open the door without noticing the piece of paper tied to the handle with a string. Only when he stopped at Atwood’s Store, a couple of miles away, did he finally see it, read it and call my dad.

By that time Rusty and I had broken into the church, just down the road from Atwood’s. Well, not exactly “broken in” –the church was kept unlocked in those days; we just opened the door and walked in. We scrounged for food in the church kitchen, but there was none to be found. I heard a car pull up outside, so I hustled out through the back door and climbed a tung-oil tree beside the spot where the old parsonage had burned down. I got as high up in the tree as I could while Rusty sat on the ground and looked up at me.

Mr. Bill walked right under the tree. “Hey, Rusty! Where’s Randy? Where’s Randy, boy?”

I expected Rusty to look straight at me and bark, but he bounded away and Mr. Bill followed, possibly thinking they were having a Lassie moment and that Rusty was going to show him which well I had fallen into.

At long last, Mr. Bill drove away and Rusty came back and waited for me to get out of the tree and continue our adventure.

Being tragic takes a lot of energy out of a boy, and I needed something to eat. Being broke, I'd have to steal our supper...and I knew just the place.

The State Overseer’s cabin on the Campground was empty this time of year. He only stayed there one week every summer, the week of Camp Meeting, and that event was long past. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, he’d left some food—a can of peaches, a bottle of ketchup, anything. I broke in through a window and let Rusty in through the door.

We shared the jar of dill pickles I found in the fridge and I drank the last of Brother Beaube’s orange juice and we settled down for a sleepless night. Rusty kept licking me in the face and interfering with my grieving process, so I let him out and told him to go home.

My dad drove past the Campground the next morning and saw Rusty lying beside the front door of Brother Beaube’s cabin. Daddy knocked on the door. I opened it and he hugged me and said, “Let’s go home, son.”

Epilogue: I never eat a pickle without thinking of the time that Rusty ate pickles with me and kept me company till Daddy found me and took me home.

SADDLING KAWLIGA

2010-12-18T17:57:00.008-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

I rode Kawliga into the front yard where my young sisters were taking care of Daddy, as they liked to do: while he was stretched out in a lounge chair reading his Bible, Renee combed his hair, Ramonda tickled his feet, Renda had just brought him a glass of tea. Ronda, (soon to turn 13,) was fanning him ... when an idea popped into her head.

“I want to ride Kawliga!”

I laughed.

“Daddy, tell him to let me ride Kawliga!”

“You can’t handle him. You'll get yourself killed,” I said.

“Daddy, he never lets me ride.”

“Let your sister have a turn,” he said without looking up.

I dismounted and loosened the saddle. “He's been acting up today, he'll hurt you.”

“Daddy, he’s taking the saddle off,” she said. “Tell him not to take the saddle off.”

Daddy glared at me. “Let-your-sister-ride-that-horse.”

“She can’t ride Kawliga,” I said.

Dad closed his Bible and sat up. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Kawliga’s too dangerous for her. I’m not going to let her ride him.”

Daddy bounced up out of the lounge chair, barefooted, and picked up a broken tree limb that one of the Reynolds children or dogs had dragged into the yard. He advanced a few steps, shaking the limb and Kawliga backed up, showing the whites of his eyes.

Daddy said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes sir, what?”

"Yes sir the easy way."

When Daddy went back to his lounge chair, Ronda gave me a triumphant look that I interpreted as, Nanny nanny boo boo.

Okay. So she won this round. I turned and tried to tighten the girth on Kawliga's saddle—but he took a deep breath and expanded his midsection. I pulled hard at the strap, but he wouldn't give in.

“Hurry up,” said Ronda. “Daddy, Randy won’t hurry up!”

I scowled. “Would you shut up?”

“Daddy, Randy told me to shut up!”

“Randall, don’t make me get out of this chair again!”

I could wait for Kawliga to exhale, or I could speed up the process by kicking him in the belly. But Ronda was yelling and Dad was already calling me Randall—a sign that things were getting serious—so I just cinched the saddle as well as I could with Kawliga still holding his breath.

I handed Ronda the reins. “Don’t run him and you’ll be okay.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

She mounted up, I adjusted the stirrups, and she rode down Kenzie Fitzgerald road and disappeared around a curve. I went back to let Daddy know, in case he’d missed it the first time, that he was wrong to let her ride a lively little horse like Kawliga. That conversation quickly ended and I was getting lectured about obedience when thundering hoofbeats caught our attention. We turned to see Kawliga running up the gravel road bucking and kicking at the saddle that dangled beneath his stomach.

“Great day in the morning!” shouted Daddy. “Look what you did!”

He picked up the tree limb.

“I didn’t do nothing! I told you she couldn’t ride him!”

“You left that saddle loose on purpose so she would fall off!”

For all he knew, Ronda was lying dead out there on the road, so I certainly deserved a few licks. By the time Ronda came trudging up the road, outraged and crying, I was crying louder. And then the back of my neck got hot and everything went white.

When I regained consciousness, I was on the couch on the screened-in porch and Daddy was rubbing a wet washcloth on my forehead.

“You got uptight and fainted,” he said.

I thought—but didn’t say—No, I got knocked out.

That was the afternoon of the night that I ran away from home for the last time. (And I would have stayed gone for good, but my dog Rusty got me caught.)

HIT BY A CAR

2010-12-16T20:42:00.003-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

I had heard that preacher’s daughters were “fast” –which sounded ominous—and I would never have gone into the woods with one, but Diane was not, technically, a preacher’s daughter. Her granddad was preaching a revival for us and Diane was spending the summer with him and her grandma, traveling from church to church throughout the South. I never got around to asking why her parents had sent her away for the summer, but it couldn’t have been anything bad. She was too pretty to have done anything bad.

She lured me into the woods behind the parsonage, leaned against a tree, arched her back, held out her hands and pulled me closer. Her kiss was different from the smack on the cheek my mom gave me each night after prayers. Diane’s lips made no sound and she didn’t kiss me on the cheek. The only thing that kept me from fainting was a whiff of her perfume.

Afterward, she just stood there against the tree, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. I leaned in to kiss her again with my head bent to the right, but couldn’t get the proper angle. I backed up and tried from the left but that didn’t give me a clear shot either.

She opened her eyes, “Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“You’re standing on Tippy’s grave,” I said.

She jumped away from the tree. “Who’s Tippy?”

“My dog.”

I pointed to a carving on the tree: ‘TIPPY – A GOOD DOG – 1963’.

“He got hit by a car,” I said. “Now I know how he felt.”

She smiled, proud of her accomplishment.

KAWLIGA

2010-12-16T06:59:00.004-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

Dad was greeting visitors in the front yard when Kawliga came flying up the gravel road with Ricky aboard yelling,“Whoa! Whoa! Stop, horse!” but Kawliga had the bit in his teeth and hit the wet grass at full speed. From there, it looked like a combination of ice skating and plowing as Kawliga slipped this way and that, hooves cutting deep furrows in the yard. After throwing up a significant amount of turf, Kawliga slid to a stop and snorted.

(Over my objections, my sister Ronda got to ride him once and Kawliga came back without her, the saddle dangling under his belly. I took quite a whipping for that one because Daddy had it in his mind that I had purposely cinched the saddle too loosely. He was wrong, but that’s another story.)

Jim Fitzgerald, the church member who sold us the horse, claimed Kawliga was scrawny because all “Choctaw” ponies were like that, and I bragged in Ag class at Lee Road School about having a horse from that unique breed. Keith Sharp and his buddies laughed and said there was no such thing.

“Not only is he a Choctaw pony, but he’s faster than any horse y’all have!”

“Then how ‘bout a race?” said Keith.

I never shrank from a challenge. “Any time,” I said. “And let’s do it for money. How about fifty cents to enter and the winner takes all?”

I had tried the fifty-cent routine before: after practicing with a fiberglass bow from Christmas ‘til midsummer, I organized an archery tournament on the first day of Youth Camp—fifty cents to enter, winner-take-all. I felt a little guilty for being such an expert, knowing I was about to take the money of my Shepherd’s Fold friends as well as from other preacher’s sons from around the state; but, hey, fifty cents was all I had to spend for the week at camp and I needed to supplement those funds if I was going to buy a girl a coke or a snow-cone every day.

Alas, I got off a bad shot and lost my money, so I spent the week with zero funds and bought zero refreshments for the girls.

I rode bareback the day I took Kawliga to race the quarter horses, thinking the less weight the better our chances. Keith and his posse met me on Lee Road and we decided to race on the grassy shoulder between a pasture fence and the ditch. The other boys said disrespectful things about my wiry “Choctaw” pony and, truth be known, he did look puny beside their hefty quarter horses. We appointed one boy to hold the money and soon enough we had our race… which was over in about the time it took me to lean forward and kick Kawliga in the ribs. I never saw anything on four legs move as fast as those real quarter horses! This put my friends from Ag in a great mood and lots of laughter and jawing ensued.

The only excuse I could think of was that I was bareback and the other boys had saddles. One jump and they were up to speed, but bareback, a leap like that would have put me in the dirt. Yeah, that must have been the reason.

The next time I raced, everything was equal. Richie Maklary was bareback on his cousin’s mare Lucky and I was bareback on Kawliga. All I remember about that one was: A. My daddy told me not to run the horse on the blacktop. B. Richie said, “Let’s race on the blacktop!” C. I could have paid attention to my daddy or to Richie, but –Lord, help me!—I chose Richie.

The next thing I remember, I was lying on Lee Road and I must have been there a while because traffic was backed up in both directions. A stranger was kneeling beside me asking if I was all right. Another man was holding Kawliga’s reins and the horse was bleeding from scratches on the side that he had slid on after falling. One of my shoes was twenty feet down the road, a layer of skin from my face was apparently embedded in the pavement between where I’d hit face-first and where I stopped sliding. There was a knot on my head the size of an egg. And my right knee was busted, (which later kept me from being drafted.)

That evening, before limping in for supper, I put on a stocking cap and pulled it down to cover the part of my face where the skin was missing. Dad took one look and said, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Take off that cap!”

I said, “I’m cold.”

Mother said, “In this heat? Good Lord!”

Daddy snatched the cap off my head. “Great day in the morning! What happened to you?”

I looked him right in the eyes and said, “I bumped my head on a cabinet in the church kitchen.”

He tried to get the truth out of me, but that was never easy.

Later, when he saw where the hide had been skinned off Kawliga’s shoulder and flank, he said, “What happened to the horse?”

I had to think fast. “Well, when I was in the church kitchen where I hit my head, I left Kawliga tied out back and he scratched himself in the bushes.”

I could always come up with logical excuses like that.

CARAVAN TO COVINGTON

2010-12-15T12:04:00.015-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

On a Sunday night during a fire-and-brimstone sermon, my dad suddenly stopped preaching and pointed at the whispering, snickering boys sitting close to me on the back pew. He called them out—not directly, but by proxy: “Brother Randy, come up here and sit on this front bench!”

The boys shut up and sat up straight and innocent, as everyone in the sanctuary turned to stare. I inched past them to the aisle… and that’s when something grabbed hold of me.

Maybe it was the devil. Or maybe a genetic clock going off in my head to mark the end of childhood.

I stood there for a moment, staring at my dad and then I looked the other way, toward the door.

“Brother Randy, I said come up here and sit on this first bench and don’t make me tell you again!”

I turned my back on him.

“Brother Randy, don’t you go out that door!”

Fear shot through me like a million needles, but I kept walking.

“I’ll deal with you later!” he said.

“Lord, lord,” prayed the old sister who would someday become my grandmother-in-law.

I stumbled through the door and into the parking lot where I slipped into our car and thought about my predicament, playing over each possible scenario of what would happen after church. Dad would have no choice but to come down hard on me in front of everybody because I had defied him and backed him into a corner. Like the shepherds on the first Christmas, I was sore afraid. I started hyperventilating.

I thought about crossing the highway and climbing the fence... to just walk away... through Atwood's pasture... the woods... wherever. Surely nothing that I would encounter in the dark could be as bad as what was going to happen after church.

I had a sudden urge to pee so I got out and stood beside the station wagon and relieved myself on the clam-shell-covered parking lot. I looked up into the clearest sky I had ever seen, and the brightest stars, and they seemed to get brighter still as I stared and peed...

... I awoke face-down on the shells with people hovering over me asking what happened and turning me over. Either the shells or the sinister force that had drawn me out of church left some bloody gashes like claw marks on my cheek and the people gasped at the sight of it.

Mother hurried to my side and stooped to cradle my head, moaning where only I could hear, "Ohhhhh Lordy."

My little sisters cried. Some younger boys stared.

My Dad arrived, took one look and said, “Let’s get him to the emergency room! Some of you fellas help me get him in the car.”

Dad rushed me to the hospital, ten miles away in Covington, with a long caravan of church members driving close behind.

While the doctor worked, Dad stayed at my side and I was comforted by his presence. He told the doctor that my mother was prone to fainting spells, too. (True: She was pregnant six times in nine years in homes without air-conditioning in the hottest places in the South, so she did get the vapors occasionally and faint dead out--but I wasn't sure I had inherited this.)

The doctor cleaned me up, ran some tests and sent me home with a bandaged face.

Epilogue: Dad never mentioned the incident again. Nor did I, not wanting to remind him that he still owed me one.

MY LITTLE BLACK BOOK WAS A BIBLE

2010-12-14T11:19:00.015-06:00

By Randy Reynolds

From the pulpit, Daddy thundered, "When I was a little fella, I got to where I could take a whipping and then go right back out and do the same thing again--whatever I wanted to do--whatever the devil tempted me with. I knew if I got caught, it would be another whipping, but I got to where I could take it without letting it break my will. And then God called me to preach!”

Somebody shouted, “Glory!”

"I was just a child, younger than my oldest son Randy. Randy, come up here, son, and let everybody get a look at you. Come on. Randy is shy. He doesn't like to be the center of attention. Come on, son."

I walked stiffly to the rostrum and stood beside him, wondering if I had enough Brylcreem in my hair to make it stick up in front like it was supposed to. Was my tie straight? Was my shirttail poked in all around? Did people feel sorry for me? Were they going to talk about me when they got home after church? A motion from one of the boys on the back pew drew my attention. He shot me the bird. Other boys my age and a little older, blew me kisses, made funny faces, pointed, laughed. I tried to focus on the door at the end of the aisle, wishing I were through it, hiding in the dark.

In a way, I was already hiding. I never spoke to any of the pretty girls in church, for example, fearful that they were ridiculing me behind my back like the boys did to my face. Surely, I thought, no church girl would ever be caught dead with a guy whose dad used him as a goofy prop in sermons!

To avoid the possibility of rejection, I avoided the girls. But I kept an eye on them —a seriously close eye, analyzing each girl and young woman with the intensity of an FFA boy grading livestock at the fair. I graded girls on a scale of 1 to 10 as they got out of their parents' cars in the parking lot, as they walked up the aisle to the choir, sang, went to the altar and prayed. Jesus was probably not too happy about my little hobby, but He never said anything about it, so I carried on. This was science. Important stuff. And, being a “writer” since approximately first grade, I recorded my evaluations in the margins of my little black book—the Bible.

I concentrated on my girl-judging in every service, trying to keep the competition fair, seriously evaluating how many points to give for physical stature, best hair, highest heels, prettiest smile. A few years later when I made a campaign speech for a candidate for Miss Youth Camp 1966—a girl named Sherry—I said “Maybe she doesn’t have much upstairs, but man what a staircase!” as if voting for a girl based on her “staircase” was the most natural thing in the world. (And this was years before Sarah Palin.) My joke got a big laugh and made Sherry blush. Fortunately for me, she later forgave me for it and taught me some manners.

Turn about is fair play, as my grandmother would say, so I had no doubt, as I stood there beside my daddy, that the girls in the congregation were judging me at that very moment.

Daddy said, "My mama says that Randy is going to be a preacher, too. God laid that on her heart, the very same way He let her know that I was going to be one. Randy, God hasn't called you yet in an actual audible voice, has he?"

"No sir."

"I hope Randy doesn't have to be blinded like Saul of Tarsus, or laid out in a coma like I was. I hope he’ll pay attention to God's calling when he hears it the first time."

This got another snicker from the boys on the back row. More ammo for them to use against me later: "Hey, Preacherboy, God called. He wants you to go preach." "Hey, Preacherboy, God gave me a message for you"-- followed by a long fart or belch, whichever was ready for delivery.

"I hope Randy would never do the things I did, the things God saved me from-- lying, skipping school, smoking cigarettes, drinking the last drops of beer from filthy bottles I found in the ditch. He also saved me from dancing the shimmy-she-wobble with women, which brings on lewd thoughts and leads to pain and heartbreak and hell!"

Ouch. The shimmy-she-wobble... my favorite fantasy... was going to send me to hell!

Daddy continued, "I thank God, now, for all those beatings my daddy gave me. His discipline didn't always keep me from sinning, but it helped me learn right from wrong. God's Word says, 'Spare the rod and spoil the child!' Have you spared the rod and spoiled your children already? Are they on their way to hell because you didn't fulfill the responsibility God gave you? Well, it’s not too late!”

Whaaaat? He wanted everybody to go home and beat their children to make up for lost time? The more I stared at the boys on the back row, the more I liked it. Not a bad idea. Not bad at all.

He let go of my neck and pointed at the congregation. "Hear me, now, you parents who never discipline your children when they need it. Listen to me, church. Sending a child to his room or making him stand with his nose in a corner is not the same as a good quality leather belt applied to the backside. It is your responsibility to keep your children in line. God COMMANDED you to do this!

"These are perilous times we live in. A Catholic running for President! Godless Communism sweeping the world! Communist agitators telling colored people they don’t have to ride in the back of the bus anymore nor eat in their own restaurants nor use their own public bathrooms!”

Someone yelled, "Tell it, preacher!"

"You know what the Communists are doing in Cuba? They’re lining the preachers up against the wall and shooting them. They don't shoot the Godless professors first, or Supreme Court Justices, or these Elvis Presleys who are trying to corrupt our children. Oh, no, Saints! They shoot the preachers first! They get rid of God’s messengers, and the rest is easy!"

If the preachers were first, who would be second? Would the families get to watch? Would they film it with Elvis crooning in the background?

He spoke in tongues for a little bit, then back to English. "Mamas and daddies, if you're not scared for your children's sake, you better GET scared! I'll say it again: If you’re not concerned about them listening to rock and roll, or going to worldly places of amusement or reading these filthy books that are right here in our public library--you're losing your own children, the battle for their souls! I tell you now, you better GET concerned!"

He twisted my head to face him. "You haven’t been reading any books like that or listening to Elvis, have you, Randy?”

“Ummm, no sir.”

“Praise God! Go back to your seat now.”

Stepping down from the rostrum, I caught the eye of Mrs. S., sitting close to the aisle on a middle row. She wasn’t a member of our church and I was surprised to see her there. An even bigger surprise was the sight of her daughter, the Goddess Jane, on the very back row, sitting beside a snickering Franky Wayne and his pals. Franky Wayne made faces at me; Jane solemnly watched my walk. What could be going through her mind? Was she grading me, giving me a number for each part of my anatomy and for my style of walking? Would I always be a number to her as some of the girls already were to me? The livestock judge had become the livestock.

Several times on that walk down the aisle, I stumbled--I, the boy who walked the rafters of the abandoned warehouse like a high-wire artist, was barely able to walk a straight line on the floor! Feeling an urgent need to look casual, I arched my eyebrows at the Goddess Jane, then looked from side to side and up to the ceiling, sucked in my cheeks, scrunched my lips and chirped like a cricket all the way to my seat--the one immediately in front of her and Franky Wayne. I sank onto the pew and sat with my head down and my shoulders bent for the remainder of the service, trying to shut out everything around me, unaware that Franky Wayne had slipped to the floor, crawled under my pew and tied my shoestrings together—a stunt that I would discover soon enough.

SIX MONTHS AT MOST

2010-12-13T19:47:00.012-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

After an emotionally draining worship service, our members seemed to dread crossing the threshold into the outer world, and so they moved up the aisle at the slowest possible pace, everyone trying to find something to say to everyone else. It didn’t matter that many such conversations went nowhere—just talking was an excuse not to leave the building yet.

"I heard your sister-in-law had surgery."

"No, I don’t have a sister-in-law."

"Sister Dowden?"

"That’s Sister Spencer’s sister-in-law."

"I thought she was yours."

"No. I don’t have one."

"Well, how’d the surgery go?"

"I couldn’t say. I really don’t know her."

"I’ve been praying for her is why I asked, but I can’t find anyone who knows how she is."

"I haven’t heard."

"What time did she have it?"

"I really couldn’t say."

"All this time, I thought she was your sister-in-law."

"No, not mine."

"Isn’t she your husband’s brother’s wife?"

"My husband doesn’t have a brother."

"Well, I’ll be praying for her."

"I’m sure she’ll appreciate it."

The mass of Christianity talked its way to the door.

“I guess you heard that Brother Reynolds’ son is going to marry that little Jenkins girl.”

“Isn’t she a little young?”

“They both are.”

“What’s their hurry?”

“It ain’t up to me to say, the Lord knows how I hate gossip, but I heard they don’t have a choice. Their parents are making ‘em get married."

“Law, what a shame! And them not even out of high school yet.”

“I give 'em six months at most.”

“When’s it gonna happen?”

“As soon as he gets out of high school.”

“They better hurry or the cat'll be out of the bag."

“That’s what I say.”

“Brother Reynolds must be pretty embarrassed.”

“He ought to be. What’s it say to our young people, he can’t even control his own family?”

“Sister Reynolds is so sweet. I guess she’s all tore up about it.”

“Sister Jenkins too.”

“Well, bless my time, I reckon so.”

“You goin’ to the weddin’?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

They ambled up the aisle clinging to every thread of conversation like a lifeline that might keep them from being swept through the door.

The children were just the opposite—they ran outside as soon as the benediction was pronounced, and the churchyard came to life with shouts and squeals that rivaled the uninhibited noisemaking their elders had displayed in worship.

Epilogue: At their wedding rehearsal a relative predicted that the young couple wouldn’t last six months...but so far it's 529 months and counting (as of July 2011.)

BACK TO INDEX: http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-hope-you-dance.html

WHY I DIDN'T BECOME A "BABLISS" PREACHER

2010-12-12T12:15:00.017-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

I remember the sweltering little southern churches in which my daddy preached his fire and brimstone sermons in the 1950’s—wood frame churches with no air-conditioning and no ceiling fans, where open windows let the heat in instead of out and insects of various denominations flew straight through the screens and congregated to worship the bare light bulb dangling above Daddy’s head. On summer nights in those churches, the humidity was so thick that people had to fan the air toward their faces to help themselves breathe. The cardboard fans they used were promotional items from the local funeral home--reminders, if any more were needed, that death was nigh.

The more excited Daddy became the faster those fans waved.

“Jesus, Jesus,” mumbled the shy people.

“Amen! Bless him, Lord! Preach it, brother!” yelled the bold ones.

(One old brother, at a service in south Louisiana, jumped to his feet, shook his fist and in a dyslexic moment shouted, “The devil’s the truth and the liar’s not in him!” And everybody said Amen.)

When Daddy made some really scary heart-stopping point in his sermon, the fans stopped, as sinners and saints alike pressed them against their lips or chests to savor the fear. Daddy’s next point offered hope and this got the fans waving again so that people could resume breathing.

I learned to smoke on those fans. I thought smoking was cool and the fan-handles were a flexible, porous wood that could be ripped from the cardboard, straightened out and lit. Smoking seemed cool because my teen-aged Uncle Bobby and Aunt Katrina did it (both were heavy smokers; both deceased now.) And I wanted to be like them and like my daddy, whom I hero-worshipped and who often preached about how much he had smoked as a child.

When I was a second-grader, Macon, Georgia, 1956, I ripped the handles off fans, lit up and swallowed smoke like a house afire in the same church room where on Sunday mornings I sang “This Little Light Of Mine.”

Long before I started smoking fan handles, I was my daddy’s assistant at his revivals in those hot little churches. When I was two and three years old, I accompanied him on revivals that lasted a week, with Daddy preaching every night. He and I would stay with the preacher’s family for that week, while Mother and my siblings stayed home in north Georgia. Each time Daddy got up to preach, I’d be right behind him on the chair or bench nearest the pulpit, with my blond hair slicked back and my cheeks scrubbed and rosy, wearing my dress-up short pants and suspenders and a crisply starched shirt.

A few sentences into most sermons, Daddy would have to take off his suit coat because of the heat, and he’d always drape the coat over my outstretched arms and make a funny little comment about me being his helper. I'd stand there with that coat and never flinch until the sermon was over, proud of myself for being up on stage in front of everybody, but also feeling great empathy for Daddy whose thin white shirt would become drenched with sweat as he jumped around and preached one of his lively high-volume sermons. People were amazed at my daddy’s preaching, and also at what a well-trained little son he had.

He liked to show me off, so after the service, when people were still milling around exchanging pleasantries, some would gather around us in the aisle and he’d ask me Bible questions that he knew I could answer. Once, when I was three, he said in front of such a group, “Randy, tell them what kind of preacher you’re going to be just like your daddy when you grow up.” He expected me to say “Church of God,” of course, but I blurted, “Babliss.” That got a roar from the little huddle of church people and Dad was still retelling the incident 60 years later. (That skill at ad-libbing was an asset in my radio career!)

For my first few years on this earth, I was so proud of my daddy that I could bust. MY DAD was the one who stood there in the pulpit and told people what to do to get to Heaven, how to live their lives. HE was the one who relayed messages from God. My heart went out to all the children whose dads were not preachers. I wondered if they were embarrassed about it.

I didn’t turn out to be a “Babliss” preacher, after all. My daddy was already the best preacher there could be, I thought, so I wanted to be something that he had not already done better than I could have ever dreamed of doing. I imagined myself as, alternately, a cowboy jet pilot, a cowboy lawyer, a cowboy reporter and a cowboy songwriter. In sixth grade, when Kennedy got elected, I had an intense desire to become President because Presidents got their picture in LOOK magazine every week.

Being taught, however, that the world was about to end—a recurring theme both in and out of churches in those days—my focus became narrower. Why worry about the adulthood that I would surely never have? Why not just enjoy the here and now?

I'll tell you why: because I –poor, unfortunate, beleaguered, ridiculed, ostracized, abused boy that I fancied myself to be—I was the preacher’s son.

But that’s another story.

BOOKWORM

2010-12-11T13:16:00.025-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

Bainbridge, GA, 1959. From behind, as she fixed breakfast, Mother looked like a choir director, moving this way and that, her arms in constant motion, putting a pot on the stove, scrubbing the sink, grabbing a box of grits from the cabinet, pouring the grits into boiling water, shaking out her rag over the trash box, turning back to stir the grits with a big wooden spoon. The mother of 6, (aged 27) was a symphony of motion.

She knew the sound of an encyclopedia hitting the table. Without turning from the stove she asked, "Are you going off somewhere to read all day?"

"I guess so," I said.

“Aren’t you selling peanuts for Sister Griffith today?”

“Nope. She said she’d call me when she gets some more.”

"Well, go out and play ball with the other boys, then. And y‘all stay out of the intersection. There's a perfectly good field over yonder by the warehouse. For the life of me, I can't understand why y’all prefer to play in the street."

"Because it's smooth and it's shaped like a baseball diamond--each street corner is a base."

"Ya'll are going to get yourselves killed playing in that street. Now, I mean it, ya'll play in the field."

"Don’t tell ME! Tell Ricky. They’re HIS friends, not mine.”

She set a glass half-filled with tan liquid before me. "You're looking puny. Drink this Ovaltine and forget about reading for today. What you need is some activity!"

"Yuccch! I hate this Ovaltine! And who says reading is not activity?"

"Don't sass me, young man. No more reading today. And Ovaltine is good for growing bones."

"That's only when you add milk, Mother. It's not the same with water."

"We don't have milk today, unless you want goat's milk."

"Yucch."

“We’ll have regular milk when we can afford it.”

"Will you get me another encyclopedia when you go back to the grocery store?"

"Didn't I just buy you the 'F'?"

"It was the 'E-F' combined, so you got two for the price of one. And that was last month, Mother. Volume 'G' is probably in by now."

"You may have to wait another month, Randy. We can't afford any extras right now."

"But, Mother…"

"Re-read the 'E-F.' Doesn't it have a lot of stuff about flying in it?"

She was stirring the grits again and didn’t see the face I made behind her back.

I wasn’t going to tell her that the ‘E-F’ was a big disappointment, that there were words missing between “Fuchs, Sir Vivian Ernest” and “Fucshia." I spelled one of the missing words a different way and came up with Funk, Jim--the pioneer who'd had most of the adventures later attributed to Dan'l Boone, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the boys at my school brought up Funk's name so often!

Daddy came in, kissed the back of Mother’s neck, tapped her fanny with his Bible and sat down across from me.

He said, “Coffee woman!” And she scurried to make him a cup of instant.

After serving Sanka for daddy and grits for me, she went over to the screen door and stared out, idly running her fingers back and forth on the coils of the door spring. There was nothing to see back there but an old shed and a thicket of bamboo that separated the church property from the family behind us. When she quit scraping that door spring, the silence caught my attention and I looked up and caught her stealing a glance over her shoulder at me, then quickly looking away. It made me wonder what she thought of me sitting there with my daddy, both of us lost in books, not talking. And it occurred to me that she must have been thinking that I was already a boy of 10 who not that long ago was her sweet little angel baby and now I was almost as tall as her and I already knew some things she didn't know and was in a hurry to learn more.

I cleaned my plate, because if I didn’t she would tell me the thing about starving children in Red China who had to go without food so that I could have enough, and that it was my Christian duty to eat everything on my plate. I couldn’t stomach the Ovaltine, though, so I left it where she’d placed it and if she could get it to China, they were welcome to it.

“I enjoyed my breakfast,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my wrist. "May I please be excused?"

Mother said, "Yes, you may."

“I need you to sweep the church,” said Daddy without looking up.

“Mother told me I could go ride my bike.”

“Okay,” he said, turning a page in his Bible.

I ran out the door, encyclopedia in hand, and Mother called after me, “Be careful on your bike!”

“I will!” I yelled.

“And no more reading today!”

I didn’t reply to that because I didn’t want to lie.

That was the day Billy Griffith saw me riding my bike down the middle of the unpaved street with no hands, reading my encyclopedia. Before that day, I was just one of the boys who sold boiled peanuts for his mother. Afterwards, though, I was something different.

He called out from their porch, "You're gonna fall and kill yourself!"

I glanced his way and my front wheel wobbled even as I assured him, "Nah, I never fall."

I tumbled butt over bicycle and landed flat on my back, still clutching the encyclopedia. To preserve my pride, I lay where I had fallen, lifted my book and continued reading, there in the middle of the dirt road in the morning sunshine, as if this is what I had intended all along. Billy Griffith strode into the street and stared down at me.

"Kid, you've got savoir faire."

"You mean the economic system of America after the Civil War?" I said.

He laughed. "You're thinking of laissez faire. Savoir faire is the French word for cool. You're cool. You nearly kill yourself, then lie there like nothing happened. Now that's real cool. Shows you can take pain."

“What pain?” I said, trying not to groan.

"Why aren't you playing baseball with all the other boys?" he asked, pointing toward the intersection of the two dirt streets where a noisy game was in progress.

"They’re all younger than me. I'd rather read."

He pointed to the church, then to his mama's house."You know, I've got a good view of the church roof when I'm sitting in the swing there on the porch. I've seen you up there reading your books."

"Well, when you've got a nosy brother, and four little sisters, you have to find some privacy."

"I don't think I've ever seen anyone reading on a roof before. Or a bicycle, for that matter."

"I have a dog, too. If I try to read on the ground someplace, he bothers me, or my brother and sisters do. Or Daddy will give me a project. He hates to see me wasting my time reading even when all HE’S doing is reading.”

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop," he said, tapping out a cigarette from a pack with a red circle on the front and lighting up.

“LSMFT,” I said. “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.”

He took a drag and smiled. “Is this the brand you smoke on the church roof while you’re up there with a book?”

I struggled to a sitting position. “I’m a Tareyton man, myself. They got that charcoal in the filter and that makes them healthier.”

Billy grunted. “Sometimes it looks like you’re smoking the longest cigarette in the world up there. Like a tree limb or something.”

I was embarrassed. “Oh, that’s just fan handles from the church. The handles are porous sticks. You rip ‘em off the fans and straighten ‘em out, you can light ‘em and the smoke just pours through. That’s what I learned to smoke with back in second grade. I only smoke 'em now when I'm out of cigarettes.”

We heard a car coming, and Billy Griffith picked up my bike and rolled it to his side of the street. I hurried after him, careful not to lose my place in the encyclopedia.

“I got something I want to show you in my garage,” he said, propping the bike against a chinaberry tree.

The stand-alone garage—actually an old carriage shed from a bygone era—was over to the side of their lot, separated from the house by a jungle of south Georgia vegetation.

I limped after him, thinking, What a cool guy. A grown man who talks to me and wants to show me something in his garage. I'd never been in his garage before. I couldn't wait to see what he wanted to show me.

LETTER TO MISS LOKEY

2010-12-10T18:49:00.014-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

When I was in First Grade (1955-56) my dad decided to submit one of his sermons for publication someplace or other and since not even God Almighty could read Dad's handwriting, he rented a typewriter. I came home from school and found it on the table and my heart skipped a few beats as Elvis' heart must have done when he touched his first guitar, or Richard Petty's when he drove his first car, or Hugh Hefner's when he... well, never mind. I was thrilled to have something that modern, that miraculous, in our little parsonage and after watching my daddy hunt and peck on it for awhile, I talked him into giving me a turn.

When he asked what I wanted to type, I told him matter-of-factly, "A letter to Miss Lokey." (My first grade teacher.)

The letter itself has since been lost to history, but as I recall, I wrote something along the lines of: “Dear Miss Lokey, I think you are a very good teacher.” She was bigger than a horse, but I always liked horses and I think I said, “And you are very beautiful. I wrote this on a typewriter. Your student, Randy Reynolds.”

My dad was amazed. Of course, my family's amazement level was fairly low: When I wrote my name on scraps of wood left over after Papa Bonnell sawed some planks, Mama Maude showed it to all her neighbors and told them it just went to prove how smart I was and that I was going to start to school in Fourth Grade. I was disappointed that I ended up starting in First Grade like the other kids my age, but I loved Miss Lokey and that made up for it.

Dad said, “Come here, Violet, and look at this.”

And my mom came in and ooh’ed and ahh’ed and told me how smart I was. She suggested I take it to school and show Miss Lokey, but Dad had a better idea: “Let’s call her and read it to her on the phone.”

Now THAT was exciting.

Daddy told the operator to call Miss Lokey for us (we didn't have rotary dials yet) and when Miss Lokey came on the line I read my letter. At the end of the call, the lady said, “That was very nice, little boy, but I'm afraid you’ve got the wrong Miss Lokey.”

My face burned, my heart pounded and I dropped that telephone receiver like it was something hot. I puckered up to cry and Dad said, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the wrong Miss Lokey,” I sobbed.

My mother hugged me and told me it was all right and my daddy wanted to find the right Miss Lokey and let me try again, but I was so ashamed of reading that mushy letter to a stranger that I refused to risk it again and no one could talk me into it. I just wanted to forget what a fool I’d made of myself reading to the wrong Miss Lokey.

That was the first letter I wrote to a woman, but certainly not the last. I wrote six letters a day to Sherry from September, 1966, till June, 1967, which is when we got married. I later asked her where the letters were and she said, “Oh, I left them at Mama’s house, under the mattress in my room.” I just about blew a gasket, but she said, “Oh, don’t worry. My mama wouldn’t read your letters. She knows they’re private.” (My mother-in-law couldn’t look at me without blushing for many years after that.)

A few days ago as I was going through a box of my late mother’s things, I came across my report card from 55 years ago, the year I was in Miss Lokey’s class. It kind of made me wonder if her assessment of me would still hold true today...

McDuffie County Public Schools School Year 1955-1956 GRADE: 1-A

Teacher: Allene Lokey

1^st 6 Weeks---Randy is a fine little fellow and I am so glad to claim him as one of mine for this school year. He made the adjustment to school routine much better than you would expect.

2^nd 6 Weeks —Randy has shown steady progress this period. He likes to read and he does understand what he reads. He is getting the sounds of the letters, and before too long he will be able to get most any new words for himself. He does not depend upon the others for any information. … We are glad that you came to see us, Mr. Reynolds, during American Education Week.

3^rd 6 Weeks ---Randy has made excellent progress this period. Randy enjoys his reading, and he understands what he reads. He can and does get most all new words for himself. He thoroughly enjoys the little races that we have been having. Randy is writing unusually well. He will try writing stories for himself.

4^th 6 Weeks —Randy has continued to make his same rapid progress. His mumps leave did not seem to bother him. He came back and went right on with his group. He is reading in our first reader, ‘Good Times on Our Street.’ He is honest and fair in all of his dealings with the children. He is a pleasure to know and teach. He will always take part in any room activity, but he does not always want to be the one.

5^th 6 Weeks —Randy has continued to make the most satisfactory progress in all of his school work. Randy is very, very dependable and when he says a thing you can count on it as being right. He is conscientious and willing to help and he will assume leadership. He reads real good, and puts lots of expression in his reading. He writes well. He is writing some little stories of his own and he has good thoughts in them. He asks for little or no help in spelling. Randy is well-liked by the children. He always has a smile and a kind word for them.

6^th 6 Weeks ---It has really been a pleasure to have had Randy in my room. You as parents have been most cooperative, too. I appreciate you working with me, and I assure that without your help, I could not have accomplished as much as I did. Randy will forget so much of what he has learned, but to help him, I’d like for you to insist that he does some reading this summer. I shall always remember Randy as a mighty fine fellow.

And Miss Lokey was a mighty fine teacher.

STRICK

2010-12-04T14:59:00.023-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

It was the mid-1950's, the Chattahoochee River had been dammed at Buford, Georgia, and the valleys were filling up with water for hundreds of square miles, an event depicted twenty years later in the movie Deliverance. The shoreline was changing month by month

as water covered farms, forests, towns and roads. Uncle Strick often took Papa Bonnell and my little brother Ricky and me fishing where one of those highways disappeared

under the water.

Ricky (age 5) and I (at 7) fished with small tree branches that Papa cut and trimmed with his Barlow knife and tied with kite string. Our excitement was unbearable as Papa opened the Mason jar he'd brought from home and dug out a worm. My adrenalin surged and I hopped with impatience as I watched the yellow worm blood dripping from my hook. Ricky wrinkled his nose and said, "Ooooghhhh" and crowded in as close to my baited hook as he could get.

Then Papa baited the other hook and Ricky again studied the process as carefully as any scientist ever peered into a microscope.

"Put it in the water over there," said Papa, indicating a brush pile under the water just at the shoreline.

"Won't the worm drownd?" asked Ricky.

"Naw, he likes it. Now put it in the water and if your bobber goes down, pull it up real quick and you'll have a fish."

I obeyed immediately, but Ricky thought about it a little while, squatting over his worm to see more of its yellow blood. Eventually, he tried to put his hook in the water, too, but got it hung up in a tree behind him. Papa got it loose and put the hook into the water for him, but Ricky jerked it right back out and hooked himself in the britches.

By the time Papa got the hook free, most of the worm was gone and Papa had to thread on another one. Papa said something stern involving the words "you little skeester" and Ricky puckered up like he was going to cry. He finally got his hook in the water and we sat still for about a third of a minute then raised our poles and moved further down the bank.

...........................................

The biggest thing that set Strick apart from Papa was his fishing gear. Papa fished with a cane pole, but poor Strick used an expensive rod and reel and artificial lures. How he got any pleasure from tying on a lure as opposed to sticking a worm and watching him wriggle and bleed, was beyond me. Strick's lures snagged on the trees, rocks, fences and houses on the rugged lake bottom but he had a sense of humor about it, often hollering that he had hooked a big one. I remember vividly hearing Strick sing out, "Good Lordy, I had a monster but he swum through a tree and broke my line" or "Law, I got me a big'un, but he swum around a rock and broke my line." I never saw him catch anything--not even a little one.

Ricky and me, on the other hand, pulled out whole schools of bluegill and perch and an occasional catfish. Most of them were about the size of a little boy's hand, but catching one of the little buggers on a sweet-gum pole made it seem as if we had a ten-pounder on the hook.

Ricky and I are older now than Strick and Papa were back then when we all fished on the brand-new Lake Lanier. I doubt we've ever again been as carefree as we were then, pulling little fish out of the water one after the other, keeping Papa busy baiting our hooks while Strick yelled, "I got me a big 'un, boys" tugging his rod back and forth to dislodge his lure from the rocks.

MORE 'RANDY AND RICKY' STORIES:

HOW NOT TO MAKE A BOMB: We did with the bullets what anyone would do. We used a hammer and pliers to break them apart, poured the gunpowder from each casing into a jar and went looking for something to blow up.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/blowing-up-boardwalk-how-not-to-make.html

PREACHER'S KID: I was outnumbered three-to-one, but Ricky said it looked like a fair fight to him, so he declined to join my fight against the triplets.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/preachers-kid.html

MAKING THE BARKER GIRLS BEHAVE: Daddy motioned for me to come up to his chair in its place of honor in front of the choir, but I elbowed my little brother Ricky, instead, and said, "Daddy wants you." So Ricky went up to the pulpit where Daddy, apparently not noticing he had the wrong boy, bent him over his knees and gave him the spanking that I deserved. As the choir sang and clapped and people shouted, Ricky kicked his feet and yowled with pain. (I don't think I ever did thank him for taking that spanking for me. So... thanks, Rick!)

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/09/making-barker-girls-behave.html

DADDY, YOU WORK MORE THAN YOU FISH

2010-12-01T19:27:00.006-06:00

by Randy Reynolds

(from an old journal I stumbled across today)

May 12, 1985 (Sunday)

I watched 3 movies, barbecued steaks, played baseball with Ryan, rode the exer-cycle and lifted weights. I read 1 newspaper and portions of 2 novels. I did not go into work this weekend—one of the few weekends this has happened in the past few years. I’ve been working so hard I’ve had no time to live.

I was absolutely terrified about a thought I had today: I thought I would skip a day of work and Ryan would skip a day of school and we’d go fishing together. I was petrified at the thought. People like me can’t do that. I’ve got to be successful first. Someday we’ll do it… someday, someday, always someday. Well, someday Ryan will be grown… someday when I have the time and money I won’t have the health. So sometime this week, I’m going to take the time to go fishing with my 6-year-old son.

Kerri and Kristi haven’t had much to do with me lately—they’re growing up; friends are fast becoming more important than Daddy. I think I’ll take each of them separately for a special lunch sometime soon.

Today was Mother’s Day, one of those great advertising occasions I profit from. I called Mother in Covington at 7:30 a.m. and asked if I woke her up. She said, “No, you didn’t wake me up. What time is it? Well, maybe you woke me up.” She’s too nice to be straightforward about it.

I called Mama Maude, but there was no answer. She must be off visiting someone.

Sherry had a calm day. She laughed a lot at the movies. She has such a delightful laugh.

5-16-85 (Thursday)

I took Ryan and his Papa Huey to the Lake D’Arbonne spillway. After a couple of minutes, Ryan caught his first fish—a little catfish. He was so proud of himself he didn’t know what to do! Later, he caught some bream. I’ll never forget him standing there in that wind in his little orange cap, grinning from ear to ear and holding up that stringer for all to see. I wish I could capture that moment forever.

5-17-85 (Friday)

Tonight we went to the bridge over Bayou DeSiard. And he and I caught two tiny fish apiece. We stayed two hours.

5-19-85 (Sunday)

We rented a rowboat and fished among the cypress trees on Bayou DeSiard. Ryan caught six fish and I caught one. He was very happy about it—though not very gracious in victory! He sure rubbed it in! We stayed 5 hours. He wore his orange hat and an old orange lifejacket. His face got blistered. He is so good with a rod and reel it seems as if he’s been doing this for years.

He gets so wrapped up in things! He watched a fishing show on TV today…and rearranged our tackle box, in order to compare our lures to what he was seeing on TV.

He has enormous powers of concentration for a 6-year-old. Maybe that’s why he was walking at 5 months—correct: 5 months (a few days before he was 6 months old)—just a few steps at a time, but he paid attention to me and trusted me and made himself do it, standing against a wall at my sister Renee’s house in Slidell and walking without help to my outstretched hands.

He knew his alphabet at age one. He couldn’t recite it, but he could identify every letter correctly.

He memorized our entire insect book at age one… learned to swim at one… became interested in dinosaurs at two and could name most all of them on sight in kindergarten. I got him to do a radio commercial with me in which he had to pronounce Pachylacephalosaurus and he got it on the first take.

He’s taking on fishing just as he did all the above, so I know he’ll be successful at it.

I was going ot go to work today (*Sunday) till Ryan pointed out that I worked more than I fished last week. I was happy to stay with him and correct that imbalance.

Kristi’s friend Kim spent the night last night. Seems like a very smart girl, a good influence, but who knows?

Kerri got her car out of the shop Friday—another $330 out of my pocket—but worth it to make her feel special. After the fishing trip today, she and her boyfriend took Kristi and Ryan swimming at the apartments where we used to live.

I looked at Ryan a long time today and it was a revelation. I think of him as a certain size, a certain age, and then he walks in the room and he’s bigger than the image that was in my mind a moment before. The speed of his growth takes my breath away--it's almost like he grew in the last few seconds. I remember having the same feelings about Kerri and Kristi. They grow so fast. They’ll soon be gone.

MAMA MAUDE: A REMEMBRANCE

2010-11-19T07:25:00.005-06:00

By Randy Reynolds

When she was a child and had never even seen an automobile, a sudden great roar in the sky got her attention. She looked up from sweeping the hard-packed dirt yard with a clump of broom-straw and saw her first airplane fly over. She said her heart almost stopped.

When she was a teenager, her daddy, Robert E. Lee Stringer, had a stroke and fell off his mule. He died the next day. Maude’s older brother Claude had already left home and there was still a houseful of people to support—Lilly, Willie Mae, the twins Corrine and Cirrine (KY-reen), baby Mary and Mama Emma. So Maude “made the crop” that year (1923 or 24.)

Maude and the group of girls she was with near Chestnut Mountain Baptist Church, had to get out of the road to let a Model-T pass. But Bonnell Jackson Reynolds stopped right there in the road to introduce himself to the pretty Maude and ask her name and ask her out. What was he doing clear over on the other side of the county, far from his usual stomping grounds? I was “just out tom-cattin’ around,” he told me 50 years later. “Looking for girls and I found me one.” He bought her a Baby-Ruth and a Coca-Cola on their first date.

After they married, Bonnell got a job in a cotton mill and so Maude’s mother Emma Stringer decided that Maude’s future was secure. So she gave the family farm to Maude’s younger sister Lilly, with the understanding that Lilly would take care of the youngest daughters, Corrine, Cirrine and Mary.

Bonnell and Maude didn’t own their own home until their forties. They once had a chance to buy a duplex in the mill village for fifty cents a week and they could have rented out half the house to pay the entire rent, but they didn’t want to be obligated, so they continued renting instead of buying. For many years, while they were raising their young children, they lived on 12 acres in the Springway Community, near Rabbittown, the area in which Bonnell had grown up. He worked fulltime in the mill and farmed the 12 acres in his spare time.

They had five children, but one of them, a boy named A.J. (Allen Jackson) died in infancy, while Maude was holding him in her arms. She was devoted to the other children—two boys, Winfred and Gene, and two girls, Willeen and Katrina. Winfred was a hard worker and was out with Bonnell a lot. Gene was an expert at avoiding work and stayed closer to Maude. A very religious woman, she taught him a lot about the Bible, petted him, helped him avoid chores to the extent possible. He had a severe illness, apparently encephalitis, at age 7 or 8, and was in a coma for a week. That must have terrified Maude, who had already lost one son while rocking him in her arms, and so it may have seemed that she smothered him with even more affection. Around this time, Gene said God called him to preach, and nothing could have pleased his Mama more.

Although she lived until the late 1980’s, Maude went grocery shopping in a self-serve store only once in her life. When she got home and unpacked the sack there were things she didn’t need and she didn’t know why she bought them. She never set foot in a self-serve grocery store again, although she often went across the road to buy items from Brannons where she stood at the counter and told them what she needed and they brought each item to her. She had a charge account at Brannon’s and allowed her grandchildren to charge comic books and Hunkeys (chocolate-coated ice cream on a stick—I think they’re called Igloos today.)

The most important thing about Maude was how she treated her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She not only loved them, she was fascinated by them. She’d sit on the rocks in her gravel driveway and play with the little ones. When they were sick or grouchy, she’d rock them in front of the coal-burning stove and sing, “Bye oh baby bunting, Papa’s gone a-hunting, to catch a rabbit skin to wrap my baby in” or some other little melody.

When we misbehaved, she said “Babbo”, who allegedly lived in the closet near the coal stove, would come out and “get” us. Which kept me under control for many years. (Politicians use this trick today!)

Her way of saying bad weather was coming was “There’s a cloud coming up.” And she’d make us lie down on the bed until the skies cleared again. If we got restless, she’d make some kind of clicking sound on the bedsprings—I never caught her doing it so I believed her when she said it was “Babbo” and he was going to get me if I didn’t be still till the cloud was over. Her fear of the weather had been heightened by the tornado that killed 500 people in Gainesville in 1935. On another occasion, she had witnessed a neighbor get struck and killed by lightning. She passed on her fear of the weather to her children—especially my dad who religiously monitors all things weather-related to this day.

At Mama Maude’s house (Papa ‘Barnell’ lived there, too, but we always called it Mama Maude’s house,) life revolved around us kids. When we weren’t there, she talked to us on the phone. When I hit my first home run in Little League, I called to tell her about it and she was more excited than I was. After the call I talked Daddy into taking the family on the seven hour trip to see her. Ricky and I stayed with her in Gainesville for the rest of the summer and I never went back to Little League. Which didn’t matter in the least—nothing, not baseball, not friends, nothing—was as exciting as spending the summer with Mama Maude.

Everything in the James Whitcomb Riley poem Out To Old Aunt Mary’s reminds me of my Mama Maude, expecially the lines: “And her face, ah me, Wasn’t it good for a boy to see, and wasn’t it good for a boy to be out to old Aunt Mary’s?”

She and Papa ‘Barnell’ didn’t get indoor plumbing until 1960. Until then, they used the one-hole outhouse at the far end of the back yard near the garden, they had heat from a coal-burning stove, they got water from a pump in the kitchen and a well in the back yard. They had an ice-box and the ice-man delivered great blocks of ice once or twice a week, lugging them across the yard with giant tongs. My great-uncle Quentin (Maude’s brother-in-law) stopped by once a week with his grocery truck—a pickup jam-packed with fresh vegetables, canned goods, and staples. They’d visit in the yard and Mama Maude would buy a few little items from him. Quentin’s truck was a grocery-store on wheels and I always looked forward to it.

Mama Maude and I maintained a correspondence by mail throughout my childhood. She saved nickels and pennies to pay for my piano lessons in 1958 and encouraged me by letter and in phone calls throughout the school year to practice hard. I didn’t. She encouraged me to become a preacher like my daddy; although I thought no one could ever be as great as my daddy, I had even greater ambitions.

Mama Maude bought all the grandchildren extravagant presents at Christmas. She waited on them hand and foot when they were visiting with her.

I’m glad she got to know so many of her great grandchildren, including my three. Every time we welcome a new grandchild of our own into the world, my wife and I have a standard bittersweet moment: one of us will say “Wouldn’t Mama Maude love to be here now?” or “Can you imagine how excited Mama Maude would be right now?”

Just thinking her name gives me a warm glow inside and I didn’t want to let the 104^th anniversary of her birth go by (11-20-2010) without sharing this feeling, and the wish that everyone should be so lucky as to have a “Mama Maude” in their lives.

-------------

“Oh, my brother, so far away

“Though I am as bald as you are gray

“This is to tell you Aunt Mary fell

“Asleep today. Whispering tell

“The boys to come. And all is well.

“Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.”

--James Whitcomb Riley

-----------------------------

REYNOLDS WRITER

MOVIN' ON UP...TO THE EAST SIDE

SHERRY'S GETTING MARRIED

THE PURPLE POODLE

I HOPE YOU DANCE

OUT OF THE CLOSET

REMEMBER THAT SNAKE?

THE BB GUN

BLACKBERRY WINE

THE EXAMPLE

CRAFTY AS A FOX?

WINT

THE MADAGASCAR HISSING COCKROACH

"Aaaaiiiyyyiiieee! "

by Randy Reynolds

GRAND THEFT AUTO

THE BIRD

HOW I WAS RUN OUT OF COVINGTON

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.

...Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)

LOCKED AND LOADED

AUDACIOUS

DAREDEVIL

RUNAWAY

SADDLING KAWLIGA

HIT BY A CAR

KAWLIGA

CARAVAN TO COVINGTON

MY LITTLE BLACK BOOK WAS A BIBLE

SIX MONTHS AT MOST

WHY I DIDN'T BECOME A "BABLISS" PREACHER

BOOKWORM

LETTER TO MISS LOKEY

STRICK

DADDY, YOU WORK MORE THAN YOU FISH

MAMA MAUDE: A REMEMBRANCE

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.