In fact, the majority of the show explored the relationship between Officers Malloy and Reed. What I found this time around was a serious, yet fun show about co-workers who grew to be friends and in the end, brothers in arms. The humor within the dialog served to break the tension and build the sense of comradery between the older more experienced Pete Malloy and the young rookie Jim Reed. I also realized that Jack Webb was a genius who actually created the first reality television show with Dragnet and then expanded the possibilities with ADAM-12 and then took the concept even further with Emergency! Granted, the shows were all fiction, but it was fiction based on reality. LA Police Officers were paid finders fees for bringing their best real-life stories to Webb who then incorporated them into his shows. Webb wanted to bring the life of a patrol cop to the screen with all its boredom, paperwork and momentary excitement included. In fact, he was such a stickler for keeping it real, several episodes of ADAM-12 were actually used by Police Academies as training films.

The key to Webb’s success with ADAM-12 was in the casting. Back when he starred on Dragnet, he balanced his dry delivery by casting Harry Morgan as his sidekick. Morgan brought a sense of humor to the staccato delivery of Webb and Dragnet became a great success. Harry Morgan would eventually take the wry sense of humor he displayed in Dragnet to M*A*S*H as the beloved commanding officer of the 4077th. But ADAM-12 was a different kind of police show than Dragnet or any that had ever been on television before. The goal was to portray police life as realistically as possible which meant that there would be a lot of non-action sequences and if audiences didn’t relate strongly to the characters, it would not have worked.

I don’t claim to know all the details of how the choices were made, but in the end Martin Milner was cast to play the older, more experienced officer Pete Malloy, while Kent McCord was cast to play the younger rookie, Jim Reed. In a slight twist, the younger Reed was married and settled while the older Malloy was a confirm bachelor who always seemed to be dating someone different, never seeming to find that certain someone, much to the chagrin of Reed. In fact, over the course of the show, Reed tries repeatedly to sell Malloy on the benefits of marriage only to be gently rebuffed.

As I said earlier, when I was a kid, I missed all of these subtleties of the relationships between the actors, but even if I had noticed it, I would have probably not understood it.

Here’s another example of how the casting of this show made all the difference. Malloy was supposed to be the one with experience and “gravitas,” so who did Webb get to play the Sergeant who is supposed to be the senior officer?

None other than William Boyett was cast to play Sergeant William ‘Mac’ MacDonald and he did an an awesome job of being leader to both Malloy and Reed. He was tough when he needed to be and a friend when that was called for. With relatively few lines of dialog over the course of the show, Mac does a great job of projecting the sense of being the boss, and yet he clearly conveyed a close relationship with Malloy. There’s an episode where with difficulty, Mac approaches Malloy to talk about his relationship with his wife and on a previous occasion Malloy stepped in to try and mend the relationship between Mac and his son. When there is a crises that requires Mac to be at the scene of the crime, he often delegates to Malloy. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t trust Reed, but it’s made clear through the course of the show that Mac and Malloy go back a long way and have developed a deep sense of respect for one another.

The supporting characters of the show are also well chosen. Fred Stromsoe played Officer Jerry Woods, a steady officer with a great sense of humor. Gary Crosby played Officer Ed Wells who started out being an annoying, ready-fire-aim sort of guy, but gradually changed into a loveable rogue who tells really bad jokes. In a bid to be as real as possible, Jack Webb cast Shaaron Claridge (a real-life LAPD dispatcher) as the dispatcher for the show. Shaaron was only on camera in one episode, but she as much as anyone was responsible for making the show as success. Her voice is heard at the beginning of every show and at the beginning of nearly every call the ADAM-12 team were sent on.

But the majority of the show centered on Reed and Malloy and their relationship/friendship. Malloy often approaches situations with a cool exterior and Reed often gets visibly emotional in various situations. And yet, the throughout the series the tables are turned and the opposite occasionally happens. A great example of this is Episode 158, “X-Force” where Malloy and Reed are trying to find a little girl wearing a red sweater. After spending a great deal of time looking for the little girl and growing increasingly desperate, Malloy finally finds her at the home of a child abuser and gives chase when the suspect runs. After being captured, the suspect mouths off to Malloy who snaps and uses excessive force on the guy. But after the adrenaline leaves him, Malloy accepts his fate with his normal calm demeanor even though it may cost him his next promotion. In the end, he is suspended for four days and while his fellow officers agree that he should have known better, no one really blames Malloy for reacting like he did. They all sympathized and probably figured that they would have done the same thing. Even Mac seems reluctant to enforce the rules against Malloy, but ultimately, they all realize that if the police cannot be held to a higher standard, then how can anyone believe in the rule of law.

Reed is the officer most likely to bend the rules for the greater good, but Malloy often acts as his rudder preventing Reed from going too far. Early in the series, Reed is involved in a shooting and while he appears very calm and relaxed during the Internal Affairs investigation, Malloy understands that because Reed is so calm, something is wrong. As it turns out, Malloy is there when Reed cracks and Malloy helps him through the investigation that ends in clearing Reed of all wrong-doing. When Reed believes another officer is being “heavy with the badge” everyone including Malloy thinks Reed is over-reacting, until Malloy sees the abuse for himself. Once that happens, there is a great moment when Reed confronts this bully officer with more years on force and goes face to face with him and Malloy is right there backing his partner up.

Perhaps one of the episodes that stands out most in my mind is Episode 83, “The Search” where the two officers split up to chase the suspects and Malloy loses control of the patrol car and it rolls down the embankment leaving Malloy with a broken leg and internal injuries. Reed convinces Mac to bend the rules and let him continue the search only to hear Malloy using the wires to the busted radio microphone to send out an SOS in morse code. Reed hears the clicks and zeros in on his partner’s location and finds Malloy in time to get him much needed medical attention.

Malloy was the perfect choice as the driver on the show as Martin Milner previously starred in “Route 66,” another show where he spent most of his time behind the wheel of the car. In ADAM-12, Malloy drove the police car in every episode with the exception of two episodes where Reed got to drive. In Episode 75, “Vice Versa”, Malloy forgets to renew his driver’s license and has to turn over the wheel to Reed albeit reluctantly. In Episode 119, “The Beast”, the boys are having problems with their regular patrol car and are given a car almost ready for the junkyard instead. After several incidents requiring them to head back to the garage, Malloy finally has had enough and he tells Reed to drive instead. In the end, the car’s parking brake fails and the car rolls down the hill and into a tree as Reed and Malloy watch with a certain amount of satisfaction.

There were two episodes that bear discussing because neither episode followed the normal format of an ADAM-12 show. Episode 60, “Elegy For A Pig” was filmed in documentary style with no dialogue uttered by any of the on-screen actors. The show opened with Jack Webb introducing the show and then Martin Milner takes over the narration until the show ends with another Jack Webb voice over. The show has Malloy telling the story of the death of one of his best friends who was a fellow officer. It tracks the emotional roller-coaster of Malloy and Reed as they honor the fallen officer and showed how police officers deal with this kind of tragedy. Episode 150, “Clinic on Eighteenth Street”, starts normally with Reed and Malloy investigating the death of an old man wearing a strange electronic belt. But, the case is turned over to the Fraud division and the show then follows the fraud investigation all the way to the courtroom where a ‘doctor’ is on trial for selling false treatments. Ed Nelson, Frank Sinatra, Jr., Dick Haymes, and Sharon Gless guest star in this episode. The climax of the trial reminded me of some of the great Perry Mason moments when the defendant is on the stand and Mason tears the defendant’s story to shreds.

The series regularly featured new police techniques and new equipment. For example, one episode focuses on a statistical method of crime fighting, another focused attention on the SWAT teams used by the LAPD and several episodes centered on the new and expanding use of Air Support Helicopters to help police on the ground locate and capture suspects. In fact, Air Support was deemed so important that Episodes 147 and 148 make up a two-part show named “Skywatch.” Reed and Malloy go up in the chopper as part of a program to educate ground units how to better work with the Air Support Team. The idea was one that Reed put in the management suggestion box and the brass decided to implement starting with the ADAM-12 team.

With a 30 minute show, the dialog had to be snappy, but there was plenty of time for humor and in my opinion the humor was critical to making the show work and to build the sense of friendship between Reed and Malloy. I love that the guys often flip a coin to figure out who is going to be paying for a 10 cent cup of coffee. The officers at the Rampart Division spend a lot of time gambling to get out of paying for meals, coffee or snacks come to thin of it! Reed and Malloy often are ribbing each other about something. In one show, it was Reed’s squeaky shoes and in another it was Reed giving Malloy a hard time about his newly grown mustache. Milner had the perfect reaction most of the time with just a look while Reed was more likely to grin really big. When the humor or lack thereof came from someone else, Reed and Malloy just had to look at each other and as a viewer you knew exactly what they were thinking.

Martin Milner had a great way of just looking at Reed or suspect and you could tell he thought the situation was ridiculous, but he played it straight and left it for the viewer to fill in the words. Less is often more in ADAM-12 and I think that is one reason the show was so successful. The show was never afraid to tackle tough subjects such as racism, domestic violence, child abuse, homelessness, old age, and a thousand other topics that are just as relevant today as they were in the early seventies. Some of these issues they faced head on and some they presented for the viewer to judge on their own. I must say I was surprised and disappointed to find that over 45 years ago when ADAM-12 started, this Country was facing some of the same issues we are still dealing with today. For all of our advances in technology, we are still compromised by our own human condition. Perhaps that’s why I think the show has weathered time as well as it has.

As I said earlier, Jack Webb and R.A. Cinader were geniuses because they focused on what really mattered instead of the whirlwind of crime. What mattered was the relationship, the partnership and the brotherhood that developed between Malloy and Reed. What mattered was how they reacted to the various situations, not the situations themselves. These two police officers were there to enforce the law, whatever the law was. They were not to judge the value of the law, just to enforce it. They were not to judge the suspects, but to bring them to justice. Malloy and Reed constantly remind each other not to get involved personally with people and yet they constantly fail to reach this goal because at the end of the day, they did their job because they cared about the public and they wanted desperately to keep them safe from the bad guys.

The title of this article called ADAM-12 great, morally unambiguous, reality television and I believe this is a true statement. There were good guys and bad guys and the lines were clearly drawn. Webb put two humans with aspirations of living within the bounds of the law and set them loose in a world filled with bad situations and bad people and then rather than preach to the audience about the good and the bad, he simply let the audience reach their own conclusions.

There are thousands of police officers who chose the profession because of ADAM-12, just as there are thousands of fireman and paramedics who chose that profession because they grew up watching Emergency! And if every one of those officers believe in the higher principles of the profession half as much as Malloy and Reed did, then the law is in safe hands.

I highly recommend that you sign up or sign on to NetFlix and start to re-acquaint yourself with the boys in blue on ADAM-12. I think you’ll find that it will be much more than just a walk down memory lane. After just a few episodes, you’ll get past seeing the old cars and the old clothes and then you’ll see ADAM-12 for what it is worth: A great bit of television in a world where great television is getting harder and harder to find. And, if at the end of 174 episodes, you don’t agree that ADAM-12 stands head and shoulders above a lot of the drivel that is on television today, I’ll bet you’ll still have found enough to entertain you to make it worth the time.

It is fitting that the end of the series included the story of Reed saving Malloy’s life and getting a medal of valor for his bravery. I guess it could be said that in a strange way Malloy saved himself by training Reed to be the police officer he turned out to be. And, perhaps that’s really the magic Webb and Cinader created with these two characters. Their lives unfolded in front of our eyes and became permanently entangled as their friendship and mutual respect grew and in the end, we all knew that either one of them would have given his life to save the other in the great tradition of all brothers in blue. The reason ADAM-12 rises above the majority of television is that it made us care about Malloy and Reed almost as much as they cared about each other. And that is reality television that I can support and endorse.

For example, in 2008, I wrote an article called “Spots In My Eyes & Ringing In My Ears” which was a rant about the lack of manners people have when using electronic devices. I was frustrated by several specific events of out-right rudeness on the part of people more involved with their cell-phones and iPods than their environment. The funny thing about that article was how much attention it has gotten over the years from internet users but for all the wrong reasons.

When I look at the analytics for this website, I see a lot of people finding this article because they using search terms like “seeing spots” or “hearing ringing.” I can only hope that they take the time to read the piece before moving on to continue searching for their potential medical cure. Even though I didn’t know it was called “situational awareness” at the time, I think it was my first attempt at applying situational awareness to everyday life.

Many professions including the military, medical field, first responders and police departments stress situational awareness to their members. Strategic Forecasting, Inc., more commonly known as Stratfor, is a global intelligence company founded in 1996 in Austin, Texas that publishes daily strategic intelligence briefings used by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies around the world. Their briefings often reference situational awareness specifically in relation to criminal and terrorist attacks.  Briefings like this one and even this Primer On Situational Awareness.

Granted, Strafor’s references to situational awareness tend to focus on threats to personal or national security, but they make a couple of great points in the Primer:

First and foremost, it needs to be noted that being aware of one’s surroundings and identifying potential threats and dangerous situations is more of a mindset than a hard skill. Because of this, situational awareness is not something that can be practiced only by highly trained government agents or specialized corporate security counter-surveillance teams. Indeed, it can be exercised by anyone with the will and the discipline to do so. Read more: A Primer on Situational Awareness | Stratfor

So, situational awareness is not a skill it is a mindset of being aware of your surrounding. And, it is something anyone can do. Not only that, but Stratfor defines five levels of awareness  “tuned out;” “relaxed awareness;” “focused awareness;” “high alert” and “comatose.”

• Tuned Out – The state of awareness of most people.
• Relaxed Awareness – Similar to the state people are in when they are driving defensively
• Focused Awareness – A heightened awareness state similar to driving in hazardous conditions.
• High Alert – This state usually involves an adrenaline rush, a gasp of air and prayer all at the same time. A car pulling out in front of you or failing to stop at a stop sign can induce this state.
• Comatose – This is when you are so scared you are frozen and cannot act or respond.

Clearly the state we should all be in is Relaxed Awareness, but unfortunately, most people live their lives Tuned Out.

The Coast Guard has published a program called Team Coordination Training (TCT) that focuses on reducing the probability for human error by increasing individual and team effectiveness. Chapter 5 of this course deals solely with Situational Awareness as it applies to the safety of the team. On the first page of this chapter, the Coast Guard defines Situational Awareness as:

Situational Awareness is the ability to identify, process, and comprehend the critical elements of information about what is happening to the team with regards to the mission. More simply, it’s knowing what is going on around you.

The emphasis is theirs not mine, but if they had not emphasized it, I would have. Situational Awareness at its most basic level is KNOWING WHAT IS GOING ON AROUND YOU! The Coast Guard points out that the success of the team is dependent upon every member of the team maintaining situational awareness when the team is in action.

There is a website called “Situational Awareness Matters” which focuses on the idea of situational awareness as it applied to first responders. The tagline on the website is “Helping responders see the bad things coming in time to change the outcome.” It’s really not about trying to see the future, but rather anticipating the bad outcomes and working pro-actively to avoid those outcomes.

I think a good working definition of Situational Awareness goes something like this: Knowing what is going on around you and proactively influencing the situation in a positive way. Now that we are all on the same page about the concept of Situational Awareness, I’ll proceed with my rant.

Recently, my wife and I stopped at the local Sam’s Club to fill up with gas and there was a line, so we had to wait. There were several lines with two pumps on each side. We chose a line and there were three cars in front of us. Car A was at pump #1, Car B was at pump #2 , Car C was the first in line behind Car B and we were behind Car C. The drivers of Cars A & B finished pumping gas and they both pulled out at the same time. Car C then begins to move forward and the driver decides to stop at pump #2 instead of pulling all the way up to pump #1. While I sat behind the wheel, with my jaw dropping, the exact same thing happened on the lane next to us. Because I assumed that Car C was going to pull all the way through to pump #1, I was too close to Car C and I had to back up and then pull around Car C and try to line up with pump #1, so I could get gas. That was better than what happened in the other lane, because someone further back in the line saw what was going on and jumped ahead and stole the open pump from the person who had been in front of them.

All of the frustration I was feeling and what the driver who was cut off was probably feeling as well, was a direct result of the lack of situational awareness of people who were more focused on getting what they wanted than on being aware of what was going on around them. Had they simply noted that the line was long and that both pumps were clear, they would have simply pulled all the way forward to pump #1 leaving pump #2 open for the person behind them. Ironically, this simple act would have been perceived as common courtesy even though courtesy didn’t have to enter their mind in order to make the correct decision.

When someone turns left from the right hand lane or cuts someone off in traffic, they are clearly displaying a lack of situational awareness. When I was taking Drivers Ed in high school, our teacher taught us the concept of driving defensively which involved paying attention to eight points on the car you are driving. We were instructed to pay attention to what was in front of us, what was behind us, what was on the left, what was on the left and what was on the four corners of the car. As well as all of this, we were expected to look ahead to pay attention to what was developing in front of us so we could react to whatever we were approaching.

A great example of this occurred to me back in 1989 when I was traveling to Meridian, MS for to interview for the job that would eventually bring me to Meridian permanently. I was heading East on I-20 and when I reached the point just outside of Meridian where I-59 North merged with I-20, I noticed a pickup truck traveling North on I-59 at a high rate of speed. The truck passed me just at the junction and sped ahead of me as I backed off my accelerator. My car slowed a bit and the truck shot forward increasing the distance between us to about half a mile.

Suddenly, the truck hit a bump in the road and the rear bumper of the pickup fell off the truck and began sliding along the Interstate. I was of course surprised by the bumper falling off, but then I quickly realized that as the bumper slowed, I was gaining on it rapidly. I needed to make a decision rather quickly to either stay in the lane I was in or move to the left hand lane. As soon as the bumper fell off, I had taken my foot off the gas so I was slowing down as well, but not as quickly as the bumper. I checked my mirror and made sure no one was behind me and then checked my left and made sure no one was on my left. Next, I assessed the direction of the bumper which appeared to be sliding straight along the same lane, so I moved to the left hand lane, hit the gas and safely passed the bumper before it had come to a complete stop. Fortunately, the pickup had stopped and the driver was heading back to get his bumper.

Now, let’s review this again, but assume I had been playing with the radio. Those few seconds of time that I had to check behind me and to my left would have been gone. In fact, I may not have even seen the bumper before I hit it. We didn’t have cellphones to text with back then, but had this happened today to a driver who was texting and driving, the outcome could have been deadly.

But Situational Awareness is not just something we should be doing just while driving. I’m convinced that we should all be situationally aware at all time. Not just because being aware keeps us safe, but because being aware makes us better humans.

When was the last time you noticed a harried mother with a two year old about to throw a tantrum in the line behind you at the grocery store? Did you take a moment to be ‘aware’ of her situation and did you consider letting her go ahead of you in order to make her day a little better? If you did, I bet it made your day better too.

When was the last time you were talking with a friend and you noticed something in their voice that made you aware that something was wrong? Were you able to spend a few more minutes with that person and offer your shoulder for them to lean on?

When was the last time you were at work and you noticed something out of the ordinary with the books and decided to dig a little bit just to make sure everything was correct? It wasn’t your money, or your books, but you might have saved your job by protecting the company.

Situational Awareness should be taught at all levels of school and at all jobs. It can help employees give better service to customers and satisfied customers are repeat customers. Moreover, satisfied customers sing your praises and refer more people to you.

I’ll leave you with this last example from my own life. When I was a teenager, I worked part time at Fred’s Discount Store as a stock clerk and sometime cashier. One Saturday, a lady came through my line with about 30 cans of dog food in her buggy. I realized as I was ringing up all the cans that the paper bags we had would not hold up and that she really needed a cardboard box in which to haul all these cans. So, after we completed the sale, I asked her to wait for a moment and I ran to the back, found a box and filled it with her cans of dog food and she left happy as a lark. The next Saturday, the lady returned and I happened to be working in an area near the dog food aisle, so when I saw her, I went and got her a box for the cans. For the next two years, every Saturday this woman would come to Fred’s to buy 30 cans of dog food and every Saturday, I met her with a box. That works out to over 3,000 cans of dog food that Fred’s sold this woman because someone offered her a box that was going to be thrown away. Sadly, I never asked her for her name.

I think that being aware of what is going on around you is really just a means to an end. Learning to be aware can make you more courteous to the world around you and keep you safer at the same time. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m only learning how to be aware of my surrounding at all times and I still fail a lot. But as Stratfor points out, it is a state of mind rather than a skill and I believe that if I continue to try to be aware, it will become easier and easier going forward.

So, maybe I am becoming that old guy, but at least I’m trying not to yell.

When You Thought I Wasn’t Looking

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw you hang my
First painting on the refrigerator, and I immediately
Wanted to paint another one.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw you feed a
Stray cat, and I learned that it was good to be kind
To animals.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw you make my
Favorite cake for me, and I learned that the little
Things can be the special things in life.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I heard you say a
Prayer, and I knew that there is a God I could always
Talk to, and I learned to trust in Him.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw you make a
Meal and take it to a friend who was sick, and I
Learned that we all have to help take care of each other.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw you take care
Of our house and everyone in it, and I learned we have
To take care of what we are given.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw how you
Handled your responsibilities, even when you didn’t
Feel good, and I learned that I would have to be
Responsible when I grow up.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw tears come
From your eyes, and I learned that sometimes things
Hurt, but it’s all right to cry.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I saw that you
Cared, and I wanted to be everything that I could be..

When you thought I wasn’t looking I learned most of
life’s lessons that I need to know to be a good and
productive person when I grow up.

When you thought I wasn’t looking I looked at you and
Wanted to say,’ Thanks for all the things I saw when
You thought I wasn’t looking.’

I mean Christmas would not have been the same without hearing at some point the arresting thump of voices replicating the sound of the bass drum, but for me, other songs like “O, Holy Night”, “Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” were more likely to stand out in my mind and signal the Holiday Season. That changed this year for some reason. Perhaps it is age that makes us see things in from a different point of view. Perhaps it is just a realization that we achieve after adding more information and experience to our knowledge base. Either way, I’d like to offer up a few thoughts I’ve recently had about “The Little Drummer Boy” and see if perhaps you might see the song in a new light as well.

First, before we discuss the song in detail, perhaps we should listen to it. Here’s a live recording of the song by Jars of Clay. It is now one of my favorite versions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next, in order to parse this song properly, here are the full lyrics:

Little Drummer Boy

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum
A new born King to see, pa rum pum pum pum
Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum
To lay before the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

So to honor Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
When we come.

Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum
I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum
I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum
That’s fit to give the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum,
On my drum?

Mary nodded, pa rum pum pum pum
The ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my drum for Him, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my best for Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

Then He smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum
Me and my drum.

Before I get into the points I want to make, I want to make it clear that the story of The Little Drummer boy is in no way a Biblical story. There are no verses in the Bible that refer to this event ever taking place and yet I suspect there are those out there who haven’t read the Bible or in particular the Christmas story who might assume that it is since it refers to events that were depicted in the Bible. I want to also make it clear that I do not believe a story has to come directly from the Bible to make Biblical points. This song has become so ingrained in the minds of so many people precisely because it speaks to values and images that resonate with each and every person whether they realize it or not.

The Kid Had Faith

The song is told from the point of view of a little boy who hears from the others around him that a new King is born and he believes in the new born King, otherwise we would not have the story of The Little Drummer Boy at all. He believed all he heard about the baby and his King-ship. He heard the people talk about gathering up their finest gifts to bring to the new King to honor him. The boy believed in this King and he believed this King was different than other Kings. The proof is in the fact that as he heard the stories, the boy began to make a plan to go and see this King. Those in power around an Earthly King would never have allowed a lowly street kid to have the opportunity to see the new born. It just wasn’t done. But our hero never doubts that he will get to see the King and so he makes his plans to go.

The Kid Had Humility AND Confidence

The little boy knew his station in life. He knew that he had no material goods as he was not a wealthy child. He knew that he was poor. Which makes the fact that he believed he would get to see the King even more amazing. In those days as in these, the caste system was firmly in place. The Romans were at the top of the food chain while Jews were at the bottom and this child was at the bottom of the bottom of the socioeconomic structure of the time. And yet, he decides that he has one gift that he can bring to the King which is his talent to play the drum. We don’t know if the boy could actually play or not. He might have been a terrible drummer. But if you’ve ever seen a baby sitting in the middle of a kitchen surrounded by pots and pans banging on them with a wooden spoon, then you know that skill doesn’t matter to the baby. The baby will confidently be striking the pots and pans generating as much noise as possible and laughing at the loudness of it all. Ability and capability are often in the eyes of the beholder. To the baby, the racket she is making is music to her ears and the fact that mom is probably nursing a migrate after about 30 minutes of this doesn’t even figure into the baby’s perception of the performance.

Perhaps the kid was really good at playing the drum. I mean if we assume that the boy was telling the truth that he was very poor, then perhaps he played his drum on the streets for a few pennies here or there and that’s how he ate. We don’t know if the boy had any parents as they are never mentioned, but I imagine if he were an orphan, his life would have been very hard indeed and his sole means of support might well have been the pennies he earned by playing  his drum. That seems to be a hard way to make a living as drums in generally walk the fine line between sounding like wonderful rhythmic beats and noise. But the Bible makes reference to making a “joyful noise” and in our story, it really doesn’t matter whether the boy was any good at drumming or not. What does make a difference is that the boy believed that his drumming was his best talent and therefore his best gift to give to the King.

The Kid’s Faith, Gift & Effort Pay Off

In the end, what the boy believed was true: He got to see the new born King and with the Virgin Mary’s approval, the boy begins to use his talent to honor the King. He actually must have been a pretty good drummer as the animals even joined him and kept time for him. And the little drummer boy played his best and he believed it was his best effort and he gave his all in his performance.

Then He smiled at the little drummer boy and confirmed for the boy all that he believed. The smile confirmed that it was good. It confirmed that the sound was pleasing to the King. It confirmed that the King was pleased that the boy came to honor him. It confirmed that the King was pleased with the drummer boy’s effort. It confirmed that the new born was the King for in that smile, the drummer boy found favor with God.

So What Does All This Mean?

I don’t know if the writer of this song thought about all these things while writing the song. Normally, when I hear about symbolism and allegory in literature, there is a small part of me that wonders if an author might write something just to write it and then secretly laugh at all the critics when they read about what they “intended to say with their story.” What really matters that for some reason this year, this song spoke to me in a way it has never spoken to me before and here is what I heard:

God doesn’t care if you have wealth. God doesn’t care if you have lots of talent. God doesn’t care if you have fame. God only cares that you do the best you can with what you have to honor and glorify Him.

And, when you do that, He smiles.

God Bless and Merry Christmas!

My dad told me that when he got a chance, he would help me mount it my bike, but after several days of holding it in my hand and turning it over and over, I became a little impatient because we hadn’t even gotten a battery for it yet and I really wanted to see it shine. I thought it would probably shine like a spot light and I knew that when I rode my bike at night, it would surely light my way. I didn’t really stop to think about the fact that I was required by law to be inside by the time the streetlights came on, but that didn’t matter to me then. The light took one of those big, square six volt batteries and you installed it by opening the front cover and inserting the battery inside the chrome case.

After a few days, my curiosity and impatience got the better of me and so after my parents went to work, I began to wonder if I could make this light work without a battery. After all, a battery was just a source of electricity, electricity was electricity and we had electricty available all around our house. I noticed that on the bottom of the light was a big threaded rod that extended about 2 inches and there were two nuts already on the rod. I rummaged around the house and found an old lamp that we didn’t use any more so I took a steak knife and cut the cord, split the cord into the two separate wires and skinned the ends back to unveil the bare wires.

Now, I’d seen how these electrical connections were made before and knew all I needed to do was to wrap one of the wires around the threaded post and tighten the first nut down on it to hold it in place. Next, I could wrap the second wire around the threaded post the other way and tighten the second nut down to hold it in place. That would provide good electrical contact with the light and should provide more than enough electricity to the lightbulb!

I found an empty electrical socket just to the left of the television in our combination living room, dining room, kitchen and without further ado or thought, while holding the chrome bike light in my right hand and the electrical plug in my left hand, I inserted tabs A & B into electrical socket C.

I was instantly bathed in a bright blue light, the sort I’d never seen before from regular light bulbs and it seemed to me in the brief time it existed to be brighter than the sun! My bike light was sooooo cool! About the time I saw the flash, there was the sound of a what I can only describe as the very loud crack of a giant baseball bat striking a concrete wall. It was almost as loud thunder and unbeknownst to me in the moment, it was deafening.

Unfortunately, the light issuing forth from the underside of my bike light was so bright and short-lived that as soon as it went out every other light in the house suddenly went out at the same time, though it took a little bit before I could see well enough to realize it. I was still standing in our darkened combination living room, dining room, kitchen holding my chrome bike light in my right hand when I began to smell what I later learned was the smell of ozone and I wondered what could have possibly gone wrong. Did I put the wires on the light in the wrong order? Was my light too cool for our electrical system? Was it perhaps, just a coincidence that the lights went off at exactly the same time?

In the semi-dark, I turned my bike light over in my hand and examined the connection points I’d configured and found that the nuts would no long turn as they had been more or less welded to the rod and a significant portion of the plastic wire covering had simply melted away.

I don’t know how long I stood there dumbfounded, staring at my scorched chrome bike light, but somewhere in the back of my head, I began to hear a ringing sound growing louder and louder until I suddenly realized it was the telephone.

I answered the phone with a shakey voice and my mom’s first words were: “Paul, what are you up to?”

“Nothing,” I said, “but something funny is going on here at the house. I wasn’t doing anything and lights went out.” I don’t think she bought the story of my innocence for a second, but she remained calm enough to tell me to unplug whatever I had plugged in and then how to go check the breaker box. She also said she would deal with me when she got home.

I followed her instructions, flipped the breaker and got the lights to come back on. I tried to get rid of the ozone smell in the house to no avail and it was as strong as ever when my parents got home and forced me to tell them the truth about the chrome bike light and my failed experiment. I got grounded (no pun intended) from all electrical experiments for the rest of my life and my dad never helped me mount my chrome bike light on my bike. To this day, I’m convinced that their reaction to is what prevented me from becoming an electrician. They yelled and yelled about how I could have burned the house down, killed myself or worse yet I might have caused massive blackouts across the city.

In the end, being older now I realize that they were probably right and that had I wired that light just a little bit different, the results might have been far different.

Speculation aside, all I really know is that  for one brief shining moment, my chrome bike light lit up like the sun!

Three Christmas Gifts

By Mildred Goff
The wise men brought three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

This Christmas, try adding three gifts to your list. Yes, I know your Christmas gift list is already overly long, that you have neither time nor money for extra gifts. But these will cost you little in time, and less in money, and they will capture for you the true Christmas spirit so often lost in the rush and flurry of the season.

First gift: to a stranger. This might be a note to the bus company, mentioning that bus driver who is unfailingly pleasant and courteous, even under the most trying conditions. Send a Christmas card to the waitress who is so cheerful and quick to serve you. Write a letter to the author whose book, story, or poem you have enjoyed recently. Drop a note to the department store whose windows entice you, with a word of praise for the work of the window dresser. You can think of many more. Choose at least one.

Second gift: to someone you find it hard to like, or someone you feel does not like you very much. It might be your cross old great-aunt, or a sharp-tongued cousin; perhaps it is a business associate who annoys you, or an irritable neighbor. Send a small, inexpensive, but thoughtful gift to one in this group. It might be no more than a clipping or an article about some hobby for the neighbor; a magazine you know she would enjoy for the cranky relative. Remember, it is easy to give to those we love, but God’s love includes the whole world.

Third gift: to someone in trouble. Think of those enduring a cheerless old age, who would be so grateful for an unexpected caller. There are many in hospitals who have no one to visit them, to read to them, to talk to them. And consider those in prisons; yes, we are told we should visit them, too. An hour spent with one of these lonely and half-forgotten persons will do much for them, and more for you.

This Christmas, give these three gifts. You will be repaid a thousand-fold.

Improvement Era
Dec. 1957;
Christmas Classics p. 95

Just like the rest of my home, my “living room” is dry, comfortable and safe just as is Magee, my favorite dog, who is currently sacked out on the couch next to my chair. She raises her head as my wife passes through. She is curious to know if Pam is headed to the treat cabinet that holds her favorite treat, meat-stuffed rawhide. Her ears perk up as Pam opens the fridge but when the familiar crinkle of plastic that might indicate other potential “treats” isn’t heard, she turns to look out into the yard pretending that she really doesn’t care. But she waits until Pam returns and sits in her own recliner before giving up hope and lays her head back down and with a sigh dozes back off to dream the dreams that dogs dream. Later, Magee will give me even less attention as I rise to take advantage of one of the multiple in-door plumbing facilities scattered through-out my home. Apparently, she is acutely aware that there are no treats stored in those places and her feined interest wanes even faster with me than it did with Pam.

It is in this safe and comfortable place on Memorial Day that the reality of our “insulated lives” strikes me hard. For several weeks while preparing for a Memorial Day Special radio show, I have been thinking along the lines of how insulated everyone is from the harsh and cold realities of the world.  It is not for me to wonder about the fairness or unfairness of life, because it is simply true that there is no inherent fairness in life and to wonder about it would serve no purpose. It is not pessimism that makes me say that, but rather realism. Our founding fathers acknowledged that “all men are created equal” and left it at that, because they knew that after a person is created, his or her perception of the fairness or unfairness of life is often determined by that individual.

This is not to say that there isn’t some inherent unfairness in life. There are some things individuals simply cannot overcome. A crippling disability, a tragic event, a devastating illness, a sudden death, or an economic catastrophy are all unfair situations that anyone may face. And while some people survive and some even thrive afterward, sadly, some do not.

Part of my preparation for the radio show was the publication of my great-uncle’s story of being a prisoner of war on Bataan and in doing so, I spent a lot of time reading his words. I noted when I originally wrote the story in 1985 that he often said, “I was lucky.” That comment struck me back then when I was 20 years old, but I failed to grasp the significance then. It would take 24 years, surviving a life-threatening illness and the loss of my step-daughter before I could read those words again and understand what he was really saying.

We live our lives insulated from the realities of life. We go to the store and buy our steaks and pork chops and chicken nuggets separated from much of the work that it takes to get the food to our tables. We click a button and bring the world into our homes instantly, and never think about our lives before the time when we could do such a thing. We decide to take a vacation and get into our cars, a train or a plane and go basically where ever we wish without a lot of thought about the days when such travel was beyond the realm of possibility. We are able to read books of our choosing, listen to music we like and watch movies we want to see. We are all lucky.

We are lucky that certain men and women woke up one day and decided to give more than their fair share. They stepped up to the plate and swung hard and hit a home run for all of us. They acknowledged the risks, took up their arms and marched into the gaping maw to fill the gap so the rest of us wouldn’t have to do it. The freedoms that I enjoy on this rainy Monday sitting in my comfortable, air-conditioned home, were paid for by the blood of thousands who were willing to do the hard things. It was a sobering moment when I heard my uncle say he was lucky, a moment that took many years to come back to me. For in his words I find the humility of a true military hero unwilling to take any credit for surviving one of the most difficult events anyone can survive. In his words, I realize that the ones who did not survive are still with him each and every day. In his words, I hear his acknowledgement of the unfairness of it all. And finally, in his words, I hear his thankfulness that God protected him and allowed him to return to the relative comfort of his life and the lives of all those he was prepared to die for.

The lives we live are insulated by the blood of men and women who did not return. And more than anything else, when he said, “I was lucky” I was really hearing him say “Thank you.” We believe in our comfort that we can change the world that somehow we can make it more fair when in reality all we can change is our reaction to the unfairness. Today, on this Memorial Day, we should react by remembering how unfair we are to only set aside one day to remember those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our comfort.

I am lucky and so are you. No matter the situation, no matter how unfair life has been, we are all lucky. To the men and women of the United States Military, I say, “Thank You!” For without your courage, your strength, your committement, your dedication, and yes, your lives, how much more unfair would our lives be.

I tell my great-uncle’s story of being a POW in World War II and Ken Storms joins the show to talk about our Veterans and the Run For The Wall that recently passed through Meridian on their way to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington D.C.

This is a show that I know you’ll want to pass along to your friends and family!

• Memorial Day Show – Part 1
• Memorial Day Show – Part 2
• Memorial Day Show – Part 3
• Memorial Day Show – Part 4

Learn more about Memorial Day here and here.

A Tribute to Taps Buglers at Arlington:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Powell Magee - 1941

Editor’s Note:
The following is a copy of a paper I wrote in college for a World War II History class. I interviewed my great-uncle, Powell Magee about his experiences as a POW of Japan in the Pacific Theater. With the exception of a few grammar corrections, it is presented here exactly as it was written. I have added multiple photos and maps to help readers understand the story more thoroughly.

Born March 2, 1920, Powell Magee died as a Child of God, Loving Husband, Beloved Father,  Air Force Veteran and  United States Hero on July 7, 1995.

This is his story.

A Prisoner of Japan:
A POW’s own story

By: Powell Magee
As told to Paul H. Tarver.

Foreword

The following is the story of Powell Magee’s imprisonment at the hands of the Japanese during World War II. It was taken from a taped interview with Mr. Magee and edited into its present form. I have tried to keep as much of his own words as possible, but to make it more readable and put it into chronological order, some changes were made. The content is still the same. During our interview, it was obvious that even after forty years, some parts of that period were painful to remember; however, one thing that I especially noticed during the interview was Mr. Magee’s repeated use of the phrase, “I was lucky.” Many of his friends were not.

I wish to thank Mr. Magee for allowing me to get his story on paper. I only hope that he feels as good about finally telling it as I did by being honored to hear it. This paper is for him.

Paul H. Tarver

S.S. President Cleveland (USS Tasker H. Bliss)

I joined the Air Force in May of 1940 and I left the United States on November 1, 1941, on the ship, S.S. PRESIDENT CLEVELAND. I arrived in Manila on November 18, 1941. That year, Roosevelt had set Thanksgiving up a week, so I got there on Thanksgiving Day. We disembarked from the ship and went to Fort McKinley, just outside of Manila where we were quarantined for fourteen days. We had to stay in tents for the duration of the quarantine, but afterward, we were allowed to do just about anything.., at least until the war broke out. I think I got to go into Manila sometime between the end of the quarantine and the seventh of December. Once the war began, well, that just broke up everything and we began loading ammunition. 

I was a Corporal when the war actually began, but sometime during our fighting I was promoted to Private First Class Specialist. They [the government] knew I was married, the new position paid more money. I held that until sometime during my imprisonment, when they gave me a Staff Sergeant rating. Somehow, they got wireless messages out of Corregidor to give us promotions.

Inez Magee (Powell's young wife)

I was in the ordnance attached to the 27th Bombardment Group. We handled all the bombs and ammunition for most of the forces on Bataan. The different company trucks would come to our ammo dump, where we would load them up and send them back out. We had six P-.40s that we loaded bombs on, and gradually as the war went on they shipped out to Australia. Once they were all gone, we had less to do, so, we occasionally delivered some of the ammo to the front ourselves. 

Most of our work was done out of Cabcaben, but we moved back and forth between there and Manila, that is, until Christmas Eve of ’41. We were at San Marcelino the night of Christmas Eve when we got the word to retreat back down on Bataan. We moved back below to Orion, and stayed there until the Abucay Line fell. Once the line fell, we moved into the Mariveles Mountains where we stayed until we surrendered. 

We fought for four months against 300,000 Japanese with about 60,000 men. Our forces consisted of between 17,000 and 20,000 Americans; the rest being Filipino scouts, Filipino army, and Filipino irregulars. Really, we had just about anybody who could shoot a gun. 

Generals Wainwright (left) and MacArthur (right)

McArthur left in March, and put Wainwright in charge. At first, it was a real morale boost. We thought that McArthur had gone for help and would be coming back soon with planes, ships, and convoys, it took a while before we began to realize that it would be a long time before he returned. We didn’t think he had just left us there. We thought that sooner or later, he’d come back for us. It was about two weeks before we surrendered when reality began to set in and we understood that it would be a long time before McArthur returned.

We didn’t have anything to defend ourselves with except our rifles, and the Japanese were dropping everything they had on us. They were even dropping old stovepipes with nuts, bolts and pieces of scrap metal inside. The pipes would explode above the ground and scatter the stuff all around and on top of us. 

By this time we had been demobilized as an air force unit and absorbed into the infantry. When the second line broke, we retreated into the Mariveles Mountains. This must have been about April 7, because on April 8, we destroyed all of our weapons and shot holes in all the trucks we had. We had been on half rations for about three months and had all of our food was stashed in a cave up in the Mariveles. We blew up the rest of our rations to prevent the Japs from getting and using them. Some of the guys left Bataan and crossed over to Corregidor. I don’t know if it helped them, though. Most of them died later fighting. 

On April 9, we marched down out of the mountains and surrendered. We now knew that McArthur wasn’t coming back, because he had told Wainwright to fight to the last man. However, Wainwright said he wasn’t going to do that because he thought that would be inhuman. Wainwright had visited us a few times during the four months we fought to encourage us to hold out. But, once he saw that it was hopeless to fight anymore, he decided to let us take our chances as prisoners.

As soon as we came down out of the mountains with our white flags, the Japanese began hitting and beating us. I was lucky. i didn’t get hit at that time, but a lot of other guys did. They called us all kinds of names…called us Crazy. The Japanese didn’t believe in surrendering. They thought we were dirt. I was really surprised that they even took us as prisoners. The troops we had surrendered to were hardened men. Later on the march, you’d see them pull a man out of the line and never see him again.

Bataan Death March Path

We began marching the same day we surrendered. We marched during the daytime, and they would pen us up at night. They had a barbed wire fence (It looked like a cattle lock) that they would pen us up in each night. We marched in columns of four, but you were more or less marching at your own pace. We didn’t have to keep step or anything like that.

There were Artesian wells all along the road, and guys would try to break rank and go get themselves a canteen of water. Sometimes the Japs would shoot and sometime they wouldn’t. If you could catch the right time when a well was close enough to the road, you could run, get a little water, and get back into the same spot. If the guards were spaced a fairly good distance apart, they usually wouldn’t say anything. They couldn’t recognize you anyway so they couldn’t punish you.

Prisoners Rest on Death March

Every so often, I don’t remember just how far, or how regularly, they would stop and let us sit down and rest for about five minutes. One particular time we were stopped, a truck came up and a bunch of Japanese officers got out and began jabbering away there among themselves. Finally, they came over to another group of Americans and wanted to know where a particular person was. They finally found him in a gang of us who were marching together. Those officers pulled him out of the line, took a bayonet, cut right around his face, and peeled his face off with him still alive. Then, they stabbed him with the bayonet and killed him. It seems that he had commanded the 31st Infantry (pdf) when the Japanese 10th Marines tried to land behind us on Bataan. He had taken his men and run most of the Japs back into the sea. I don’t know how they found out who he was, but they did and they got rid of him.

I saw them cut a Japanese woman’s breast off because she was trying to give us some food. Other people who gave us food had their tongues cut out. We just wanted to take and get a hold of them jokers and really tear them up. But we knew, it wasn’t any use to do that because we just get killed ourselves.

Bataan Collapses!

Some of the guys broke from the ranks and tried to get away. A few of them made it, but most of them didn’t. Early in the morning or late in the afternoon, they would break ranks and head for the woods. Most would wait until we came to a really thick part of the woods and then break. The ones that got away usually joined up with guerilla groups and helped fight their way back down Bataan. I never did try it, I just, I was afraid to try it. Afraid they’d catch me and kill me. I figured I’d stand a better chance by going on and at least I might get a little bit of food. We had no idea that it would be as bad as it was. I guess deep inside we still figured that McArthur was coming back for us, but the further we marched, the less hope we had.

Death March Map

It took us seven days to reach San Fernando and the further we marched up the island the better the treatment got. It still wasn’t good but it was better. See, the further north we marched, the more Japanese Air Force guards we ran into. They still had air supremacy, so they were not too worried about proving themselves as being better than us. In fact, just before we reached San Fernando, they let us go out into a sugar cane field and cut ourselves some stalks. We tied the stalks onto our backs and nibbled on them as we walked. Other than the sugar cane, I only got five tablespoons full of rice on the whole march.

Well, we marched on into San Fernando where we spent the night. This was the only time I remember getting hit on the march. It was the morning after we got there, and somehow, I slept late. I guess I was so exhausted. A Japanese guard came by and hit me with a stick across the leg and woke me up. Then he started jabbering at me, telling me to get up and let’s go, which I did, hurriedly.

They loaded us onto a train that day, and headed for Capas. They stacked us in those railcars like cattle. We couldn’t even sit down. Once we reached Capas, we began marching again, until we reached Camp O’Donnell.

Camp O’Donnell was to be a training base for the Filipino army, before the war. It had barracks and a mess hall. The Japs put us in there any way they could. They didn’t try to keep companies separated or anything, we just were all thrown in there together. Inside our barracks were beds that must have been about three feet high. The mattress was nothing more than bamboo slats laid across the bed. We had no cover, but then we were not in danger of getting cold, because of the hot weather.

Camp O`Donnell

I got really bad sick at this camp. I was so weak I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I crawled to the mess hall, and a cook saw me coming. I hadn’t eaten in about ten days, so he took a board he had, it must have been about two feet square, and piled it up with rice and handed it out the door to me. I ate every last bit of it. Sure enough, it stopped my diarrhea and I began to feel better. Two or three days later, the guards asked for a detail to go back down on Bataan. I volunteered for the job because I knew I could get more food if I worked.

Several of us got on a truck and headed back down on Bataan to work in the mechanic’s shop the Japs had set up. They wanted our detail to go out and pull in the trucks that we had shot up before we surrendered on April 9. There were four of us in our particular group and a guard. We had an old van-type truck, and I did most of the driving. We lucked up and got a good guard. A lot of times after we had hooked up to a vehicle and headed out, he would lay his gun down in the back and go to sleep. We could have killed him, I guess, but what good would it have done to kill just one. But, he turned out to be a pretty good Joe.

The Filipinos had little fruit-stands along the roads on Bataan. Usually, on the way back the guard would get us to stop at one of these stands, where he’d buy us candy and bananas. However, I only had this “good” life for about three weeks before I caught malaria.

Cabanatuan Prison Hut

I couldn’t work anymore, so they sent me to Cabanatuan. It was just outside of San Fernando. It was split into a hospital area and a work area. I stayed in the hospital part for five months. There were different sections in the hospital area itself and as a person got gradually worse and worse, he moved to the next section until he finally died. I don’t remember the total number of men who died at this camp, but I do know that I saw them bury 165 men in one day.

After five months on the hospital side, I finally was able to volunteer for the work side again. I went back to hauling trucks, but shortly thereafter, I got sick again and had to go back to the hospital side.

It was around the middle of ’43 when I finally got a little better. By this time, we all had begun to pick up on a few Japanese terms, but I got lucky. I met up with a guy from Shabuta, MS, named McKee. He had gotten to where he could speak pretty good Japanese. We worked together for a while at Lipa City in the Batangas Province.

We were building an airfield there at Lipa, and the trains would come in bringing the large base rocks for the runway. Well, we had one particular guard that nobody liked. So we did everything we could to get at him. Sometimes we would call him over to show off his muscles and make him lift the rocks until he figured out what was going on. A couple of times we would be up on the train car handing down rocks, and we would do our level best to drop a rock on him. We never hit him, but we made him mad pretty often. One time he got so mad-he picked up a board that was about one inch by ten inches by ten feet long and swung it at us. He wound up hitting a railcar, which only made him madder. He started cursing in Japanese, and finally got so mad that he just turned ‘and walked away. While we worked on the airfield at Lipa City we got all of our information from the Filipino farmers who worked their farms beside the airstrips. We didn’t talk to any of them, but we had ways of getting information. One of the best worked like this:

We had helmets that were made out of halved cocoanut shells. They had a band on the inside. At the end of the day, when all of the men loaded up on the trucks and began to drive off, we made it a point to drop our helmet. We would then beg the driver to go back so we could get it. He usually would and we would continue our journey back to camp. That night we would feel along the inside of that band until we found a small piece of paper. On the paper might be written, “Yankees win 7 to 2.” By that, we knew that the Americans were winning. That kept our morale up pretty good and kept us in touch with the outside world.

Another way to boost morale was to sabotage any and every thing we could. We were building a runway with rocks and dirt. Now if we left holes in the rock base and simply filled it in with dirt, the packer machine would come by and get stuck. It would take them two or three days to get him out of those holes.

The Chocolated Laxative

One of the best sabotages that I pulled off involved getting the best of a guard. The Red Cross got some packages in to us in 1943. Now, for some unknown reason they sent each one of us a small box of Ex-Lax. The last thing we needed in the Philippines was a box of Ex-lax. However, for some reason, that morning, I had put my box of Ex-lax in my pocket and headed out to work. Well, this Jap guard saw me and wanted to know what the box was. I told him it was candy and asked him if he wanted it. He looked at it, and I told him to stick it his pocket and to take it home. He did, and I didn’t see him for about three weeks. So, whether that was what caused his absence, I don’t know, but it did give us something to talk about.

After we finished working at that camp, they moved us to the Randolf Field of the Philippines. We named it that because it was sort of like the Randolf Field in San Antonio where they trained all of the pilots. Well, they had a good solid runway, which was built out of a layer of big rocks covered with pea gravel, which was then covered with three to four inches of dirt. But since the Japanese didn’t have anything for us to do, they made us use picks and tear up the runway, clear off the area, and then build the runway back. But, we’d loosen those rocks and then not pack it right. Sabotage. Sure enough, shortly thereafter, late one afternoon, we were in the middle of roll call when we heard the biggest explosion you’ve ever heard. A Japanese fighter plane carrying ammunition had cracked up out there. It had hit a soft spot. Although morale went up drastically, we were punished, too. They lined all of us up and began to hit each of us on the back with a pick handle. I think that’s what’s wrong with my back today. I was lucky; some of the guys got their backs broken.

We stayed at this camp until sometime in 1944 when the Americans began coming back into the area. I remember one day in particular, we were out building revetments for the Japanese airplanes. Revetments were U-shaped embankments 12 to 15 feet high. Planes were backed into them, which protected the planes from shrapnel from bombs dropped by the American planes. Anyway, we were out there working when somebody looked toward Manila, and the sky was just, well, it looked it was full of gnats. It was black; there were so many planes. You could hear bombs bursting and everybody was yelling. We were telling the Japanese that the planes were American Skokies, and they were saying “NO! Japanese Skokie!” Then the planes began to get closer.

In the camp, we had 6 buildings. The Japanese guards lived in the first two and the next three were the prisoners’ barracks and the last one was the mess hail. Across from our barracks was an old plane. But, those American planes came over in droves. They bombed the guards’ barracks and dropped a bomb through the cockpit of that old plane, but never once did they come close to our barracks not the mess hail. Somehow, they knew which barracks were ours, but we still don’t know how they knew. There was only one American casualty that day. One of the bombs kicked up a rock that hit one of our guys in the head. All he got was a scratch.

That night Japanese officers came and told us to pack up. They were moving us to Bilibid prison. They loaded us onto trucks and headed for Manila. Then they took us into Luzon to Bilibid where we stayed for nine days.

Bilibid Prison

At Bilibid we were fed twice a day. For breakfast, they gave us cracked corn, just like the corn you’d feed to chickens. They gave us about half a can that corn, boiled. Then that night, they gave us about 3/4 of a cup of dry, cooked rice. On the ninth day, they loaded us onto a ship headed for Japan.

They took us to Manila Bay and loaded on the ship and put us in the holds. There was a front and back hold, and they stuffed 1,122 of us down into those two holds, we couldn’t sit down. There were about 500 of us in one hold and 600 in the other. We stayed on that boat for thirty-nine days.

We set sail from Manila Bay and moved up the coast of China. Everybody got to working together and finally maneuvered ourselves into sitting positions. On the inside of the ship there were ribs running up and down the sides of the holds. They were fairly wide and they had boards going crossways. Some of us climbed up onto those boards and rode there for most of the trip.

According to Japanese figures, of the 50,000 POWs they shipped, 10,800 died at sea. Going by Allied figures, more Americans died in the sinking of the Arisan Maru than died in the weeks of the death march out of Bataan, or in the months at Camp O’Donnell, which were the two worst sustained atrocities committed by the Japanese against Americans. More Dutchmen died in the sinking of the Jun’yo Maru than in a year on the Burma-Siam railroad. The total deaths of all nationalities on the railroad added up to the war’s biggest sustained Japanese atrocity against Allied POWs. Total deaths of all nationalities at sea were second in number only to total deaths on the railroad. Of all POWs who died in the Pacific war, one in every three was killed on the water by friendly fire.

— Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese

POW's Transferred via Hell Ships

I had been down in the hold for maybe, 12 or 15 days when I finally decided to get up onto the wall. It was just getting so bad down on the bottom. It was terrible. Guys began drinking their own urine or seawater because there was nothing else to drink. I got lucky and got sick so the guards let me come up on the deck. While I was up on deck, I helped some of the other sick guys, and quickly gained my strength back. I guess I got well too fast, because it wasn’t long before the Japs realized I was feeling better and put me back into the hold.

We proceeded to Hong Kong Harbor and got trapped by some U.S. submarines. We had to go up the Canton River at night to keep submarines from slipping in and sinking us. American planes constantly bombed, but it always seemed that they hit on each side of us and miss. After being trapped for 11 days in the Harbor, we pulled out and headed for Formosa.

We stayed at a camp at Taipei for about 2 months. We had to work there too, but it was fairly easy. We had to go out between 8 and 9 in the morning and hoe in some gardens they had around the camp. We had an interpreter there who had graduated from UCLA, so we didn’t have too much language problem. The Japanese treated us pretty good there on Formosa. In fact, for the Christmas of ’44, they kill 600 rabbits and stewed them up for us. That’s about the only good thing they did for us. After staying at Taipei for two months we got on another boat and left Formosa for Kyushu Island. It took fourteen days to get there.

We landed on Kyushu in January of 1945 and got on a train to cross the island. We crossed over from Kyushu to Honshu Island [Japan's main island] on ferryboat. Then we got on yet another train and began the trip up the coast of Japan. The further north we moved the more snow we saw, and by the time we got to Sendai, it was strictly snow. It was or must have been five or six feet deep up there. We got off the train at Sendai and walked about five or six miles into the mountains to the camp we stayed at until the war ended.

During the spring of 1945, we worked at the camp in Sendai. We could do very little work because of the snow, but since trucks could not get up the mountain, it was our duty to go into town and unload the supply train whenever it came in. We ate better because we were able to steal food from the bags as we brought them up the mountain.

We wore old World War One uniform pants, the kind with the leg wrappings. We would make a hole in a bag of rice and let the rice fall into our pants. The rice would work its way down to the legs of our pants, and since we were never searched, we could get past the guards. Our guard knew we were taking the food, but he told us if we got caught he’d say he didn’t know us.

The food they gave us was a little better, too. It had to be since the work we were doing then was harder. We had more fish and dog while we were at Sendai. The fish was a frozen fish that the cooks cleaned for us. We also ate a lot of dog while we were in Japan. If I had been a rat, I would have stayed as far away as possible from any of the camps. I didn’t eat any rats, but many people did.

Around May of ’45, the work began to get harder. We worked in the lead and zinc mines gathering ore for the Japanese war machine. We had ten men details to go into the mines and load the ore onto small railcars. The cars were much smaller, because of the weight of the ore.

Anyway, I didn’t have to work in the mines much because of a particular incident. I had to go into the mine and work one day, and as the ore was broken loose from the walls, I was loading it onto the small railcars. The rails the cars rode on were built on a small incline that made it easy to roll them out of the mines. After loading a car, I was going to ride the car out of the mine. As I rode, the car went faster and faster. Finally, I decided that it was going too fast for me and tried to jump off. However, by this time, I was moving entirely too fast and was afraid to jump. I started yelling, “Get Out of the Way!” I must have been making 45 or 50 miles per hour when I came out of the end of that mine. When it finally stopped, the guards were furious. One of them took a big hand rod that the men used to drill holes in the rocks, and swung it at me. I ducked and he hit the edge of the tunnel with the rod. It almost shook his teeth out. They really raised Cain about it, but after they cooled down and found out what happened, they didn’t say too much. But, that was the only time I had to work in the mine from then on.

I was lucky. It was cold and damp down in there. And, it was easy to get lead poisoning in those mines. One guy got lead poisoning and they had to amputate his leg at his knee. He said in normal times his weight usually was 218 to 220. He weighed 98 pounds before he died. The lead poisoning just finally went all over his body.

Hiroshima Is Bombed

Finally, it was all over. Well, at least the imprisonment. They [the US] had dropped The Bomb. The old Jap commander at the camp came out the day after they dropped the bomb around 2:00 pm, to tell us that the war was over. There was some kind of yelling and crying going on.

The guards got scared that we would take our revenge on them, so they ran off shortly after the commander came out. Only three Japanese stayed that night; the commander, his interpreter, and one other guy. We went looking that night for the guards that had run of f, but we didn’t find any of them.

The next day, two fighter pilots flew over and dropped leaflets telling us that supplies were on the way. However, those fighters missed our camp and all of the leaflets fell in the city down below us. Later that afternoon, two big bombers flew over our camp real low, made a big circle, and then the bomb-doors began to open. The first thing we’ thought was, “Oh, my God, don’t tell me that the Americans are gonna bomb us, since the war has ended. Since we didn’t know that they were dropping food and clothing, we began to run to get away. Two guys, who were running, were killed by big tubes of clothes. I guess that was about the worst thing I saw over there. These two guys had made it through all the torture and were killed accidentally by their own side.

We gathered all the food up and took it to the mess hall and had a feast that night. At midnight, we had a feast. Then, we got word that there was to be another drop in about two days. Well, we did this one right. We went outside the camp and made big targets out of a bunch of sheets. This time, it felt really good to see them planes coming over, even with the bomb bay doors open.

We were told to stay at the camp until officers came and got us. Once they came, we went to Tokyo Harbor, where we spent the night on the Battleship Missouri. Within a few days, we were on our way back home.

Japan Surrenders!

We left San Francisco on November 1, 1941, and returned on October 26, 1945. We lacked just a few days being overseas four years. I was discharged on May 31, 1946. I had enlisted on May 23, 1940. Out of the six years, I had spent three and one half years as a prisoner of Japan.

I called my wife, Inez, from San Francisco and talked to her for the first time in five years. In fact, she had not heard from me that whole time. She didn’t even know if I was alive, until I got back. I cried over the phone with her. It felt good to be back home.

I suppose that during my stay the worst part had to be the not knowing whether I’d be alive tomorrow. Whether your own planes would drop the bomb that would kill you. We didn’t know whether those Japs would go berserk tomorrow and kill the whole lot of us like cattle. We just couldn’t envision a small country like Japan taking over America, but since we didn’t know if they had or not all we could do was hope that they hadn’t. You didn’t know what was going to become of you next.

You just didn’t know.

Inez & Powell Magee

Anne Matilda Farrar McCaleb

We all called her “Grandmother.” In reality, she was my father’s grandmother and my great-grandmother. Anne Matilda McCaleb (née Farrar) was born on May 8, 1887 and died February 3, 1983 at the age of 95, just a little over four years shy of her 100th birthday. There was never any confusion among the family when speaking of Grandmother because both of my parents’ mothers were called “Grandma” and only Anne McCaleb was afforded the full-blown honorific, “Grandmother.” I’m not sure how that happened and I’m not really sure it matters.

What I am sure of is that I was a lucky young man because until I reached the age of 18, I was fortunate to have both my maternal and paternal grandparents and a great-grandmother still alive. More fortunate still, I was able to grow up with ample opportunies to get to know and enjoy all of these wonderful people. In light of the fact that tomorrow is Mother’s Day, I thought it would be appropriate to share a funny story about my Grandmother that happened when I was about 11 years old.

I encourage you to click on the picture to the right and take a closer look at this regal lady of the South. The straight line of her lips that might make her look stern is softened by the openness of her face and the warmth of her eyes. If you were fortunate enough to know her as I did, you would perceive the spark of mischief behind that face and you would know that this was how she looked just before a smile.  I looked closely at this photograph while preparing it to be published on the Internet and I have to believe that she would have been amused by the Internet and would enjoy reading this story almost as much as I am enjoying writing it.

Grandmother was married to Sidney Brisco McCaleb, Sr. and spent much of her life on Smithland Plantation in Kingston, MS south of Natchez. I never got to know my great-Grandfather since he died just a couple of years after I was born in 1965. To my knowledge there is only one photograph of me with both of my great-grandparents and I was just a baby at the time. Grandmother suffered from hip problems which apparently is a family problem that several of her children and grandchildren have inherited. Grandmother was in her 70′s when Grandfather died and because of her hip problems she was pretty much relegated to being in a wheelchair most of the time. She faced her disability and her loss with the equanimity and steadfastness of a grand dame of the South but by the early 1970′s she decided to close her home in Kingston, MS and live with her daughter Ella and her son-in-law Calvin in their home outside of Houston.

My parents now live on the land that is known as Smithland along with several of my aunts and uncles. Interestingly enough, Grandmother’s son, Sidney McCaleb, Jr and her daughter, Ella now also live on this land. The old home that Grandmother kept for so many years before she “broke-up housekeeping” is still standing, though it has fallen into disrepair and is only the shell of what it once was. 

There is an oilwell on Smithland Plantation and the money earned from the oil along with her social security gave Grandmother a comfortable life with her daughter and she was able to begin a habit that stuck with her until the end. Each year around the beginning of summer, she would board a plane headed for California where she would visit for a couple of weeks with her son, Sidney, Jr. and his wife and children. At the end of her stay, she would board another plane headed for Washington, D.C. where she would stay for a couple of weeks with her daughter, Anna Belle and her husband Johnny. When that visit was concluded, she would fly to Birmingham to spend some time with her daughter, Jo and her husband, Pete, and their children. And then, when the time was right and because Natchez, MS didn’t have an airport, Grandmother would board yet another plane and fly to Jackson, MS where my parents and I would pick her up and she would spend a couple of weeks in our home prior to having us drive her to Natchez to stay with my Grandma, Mary Louise Tarver and my grandpa, Roy Howard Tarver. At the end of her time with them, we would return to Natchez, pick her up and take her back to the airport in Jackson to fly the final leg of her journey back to her home in Houston. She used to say, “As long as the oilwell keeps pumping, I’m gonna keep flying!” The well kept pumping and she kept flying until she died in 1983.

Most of my memories of Grandmother start around the year 1975 after I was 10 years old. I barely remember her in a wheelchair, because sometime around the age of 85 she had her first hip-replacement surgery. As soon as she was recovered from that, she had the other hip replaced and went from being wheelchair-bound to being able to walk across the floor with two cups of coffee and not spill any. With her renewed mobility, and her spirits high, I believe she began to enjoy life a lot more and old age became a badge of honor for her. At the time of her death she was already planning her 100th birthday party!

I mentioned earlier that Grandmother’s face concealed a mischief that made her delightful to be around. One particular pleasure that she enjoyed after getting “ball-bearing hip-joints” as we used to call them occurred at the airports. During the mid to late 1970′s airport security began to tighten a bit after some hi-jackings and now people were having to go through metal detectors prior to boarding their planes. Grandmother loved to go through the detector and not tell anyone she had metal hip-joints just to make the alarm go off. She said it was because then they would have to “frisk” her. Apparently from the stories I heard, she like to do this alot.

One of the things I remember most about Grandmother other than her spunk and high-spirits was her addiction to reading. She was a voracious reader and constantly had a book that she was half-way through. It must have been a trait that she passed on because all of her children were heavy readers and I have also been blessed with that gift as well as an interest in writing. Her trips to visit all of her children were made for the obvious reasons: she loved to spend time with them, she loved to visit, and she loved to travel. But one less obvious reason that she made all those trips was she was out of books. She always left Houston with a bunch of books packed in her bags and she traded with everyone along the way. By the time she returned to Houston she had a whole bunch of new but slightly used books to read in the coming year.

It could be argued that Grandmother was reading to improve her mind, for science has shown that you must continue to use your brain as you grow older or brain function will diminish, but I reget to inform you that I don’t believe that was why Grandmother read books. You see, my Grandmother was addicted to romance novels. All kinds of romance novels. The stuff women take to the beach with them with pictures of hunky guys on the cover with torn shirts holding a damsel in distress in his arms in the middle of a rain storm. I remember sneaking peeks at those books and they were pretty intense. Today, those books would probably not get a PG rating if they were turned into movies, but at the time they were my Grandmother’s favorite entertainment. Perhaps, just perhaps, they were also a form of travelling for her. A chance to visit places she’d never been or to do things she’d never done. Whatever the reason, I do remember the book trading process was pretty well complete by the time she reached our house and she never was more than an arm’s length away from her book.

I also remember her black creepers. Grandmother never left her bedroom without being dressed, having her hair in place, wearing her “grandma stockings” and black creeper shoes. I can’t remember if they were laced up or not, but I suspect they were not. I remember the soles were flat and made of soft rubber and being black they went with everything she wore. I called her stockings “grandma stockings” because they were what you would expect and sometimes they were a little loose. But because she always wore a dress, she always had her stockings on. There may be family members who can shed more light on this particular subject, but for now I’m writing about my memories and my memory of Grandmother always included her stockings and her black creepers. I know you are probably wondering why I’m fixated on this particular subject, but hang with me on this because they play a big part in this story.

I suppose that I was given a great gift by growing up in Jackson and Pearl, Mississippi; for living in those places put us directly in Grandmother’s flight path on her annual journey and it made it possible for me to get to spend a great deal of time with Grandmother. She was as regular as the seasons and as soon as school was out, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we would get the call from Aunt Jo in Birmingham that she had put Grandmother on the plane there and she’d be landing at Jackson’s airport about 1 hour later. I can’t remember how I felt about it at the time, I suspect that I was like most kids at that age who dreaded older people staying in their home, I hope that if I was like that, I didn’t say too much about it to my parents. Once she arrived at our house though I know I enjoyed her company and now that I’m older I know that I miss her often.

Grandmother was a great story teller, didn’t mind having a conversation with a child and she was a pretty good cook too. She was especially good at making something good out of not much at all. I remember her taking all the leftovers out of our refridgerator one year and making a soup that I remember not so much for how it tasted, but for the fact that she threw in some macaroni and cheese left from a previous meal and the elbow macaroni bloated up and became huge in the soup and that was the first time I ever had noodles in a soup that wasn’t chicken soup! One year she came to our house and noticed there were wild blackberries growing on the fence behind our house and she told me to go out and pick the blackberries and bring them to her. I did so and soon I smelled the wonderful odor of a blackberry cake baking in the oven. All of the blackberries sank to the bottom so when she turned out the cake the blackberries became the topping. I will never eat a blackberry tart or pastry without thinking of the cake my great-grandmother made for me that day!

As I said, most of my memories of Grandmother seem to start around 1975 after I turned 10 years old. I believe this particular incident occurred in 1976 when I was eleven and though I’ve talked to my mother about the timing, I can’t seem to narrow it down any closer than that. Based on where we lived at the time, it seems about right. We were living on a street named Ramada Circle in the Forest Hill area of South Jackson, MS and I believe this was the summer between my 6th and 7th grades. We were living in one of the nicest homes I remember us living in at the time and it was a light brown brick home on the top of small hill because we had a steep driveway. Inside was a big fireplace and what I though was plenty of room to be a kid. My father and mother were both working hard to build their fledging auto-repair business in Pearl, MS some 20-30 minutes away from our home and in truth I was a latch-key kid. After school each day, I’d ride the bus home arriving around 3:30pm where I would do my chores (most days) and watch “The Gong Show” and “Dark Shadows” repeats and wait for my parents to get home usually by 5:30pm. It was a different time back then and it was much safer for a 10 year old kid to be left alone. I was an only child and didn’t have any brothers or sisters to argue with or fight over the television and I was pretty happy with the arrangement. At least from what my mother tells me, I was a fairly responsible kid excluding the time I tried to wire up my bikelight to 120 volts with a cord off an old lamp. Or the time I “accidentally” shot my best friend in the butt with my bb gun. Or the time I tried to jump a ditch with a 10-speed and crash landed and bent the rims on my relatively new bike. Or the time I…….but I digress.

We had decent furniture, but there was one chair that we owned that was kind of a trick chair. It was covered in naugahyde that was supposed to look like real leather, but the older the chair got, the more orange it got. I don’t really know that color it was when it was new, but I definitely remember that it had an orange tint to it. The chair was deep and wide and very comfortable. It wasn’t a recliner, but rather it was mounted on a base with five feet that stuck out in a star pattern. Over the years the springs had worn out and unless you were careful and made sure that the back of the chair was resting on against one of the feet, it was possible to get too comfortable and the chair would turn over backwards leaving you on your back.

When Grandmother arrived that year, Mom and Dad both explained to Grandmother about the pecularities of the chair and warned her off telling her that she should not sit in the chair for any reason and that she should stick with the other chairs or the couch. While Mom and Dad and even me were around and in the room with her, Grandmother complied with our instructions and she didn’t try to sit in the chair. However, as I said earlier, Grandmother had a mischievious and rebellious streak in her and I believe that it began to eat at the 88 year old woman that there was any chair anywhere that she should be forbidden to sit in. Several days into her visit, she began to plot her chance to try out the naugahyde chair. It was too inviting, it looked too comfortable, and by God it was off-limits which just incited her even further.

It was a sunny day when Grandmother put her plan into action. I remember the sky was blue with white billowy clouds. It was hot outside and I spent much of the day inside with Grandmother in case she needed anything and because frankly I didn’t like hot weather. Besides, I had been given the responsibility to look after Grandmother and it just wouldn’t do for me to be outside riding my bike somewhere when I had to take care of her. It was getting up towards lunch time and I told Grandmother that I was going to the kitchen to fix us some sandwiches for lunch. She was sitting comfortably on the couch reading her latest romance novel when I walked the 20 steps from the living room to the kitchen on the other side of the wall. I had gotten most of the fixings out and was starting to make our sandwiches when I heard this “WHUMPPPFFFF!” sound from the living room and then silence. My first thought was, “Oh my God! Grandmother has fallen!” and I immediately rushed toward the living room.

As I entered the living room through the doorway that joined the breakfast nook with the living room, I was confronted by a sight that brings a smile to my face everytime I think of it now, but at the time it was all I could do not to panic. I saw the bottom of the orange naugahyde chair with the five footed base looking like a star and rising just behind were my Grandmother’s legs covered with wrinkled and loose “grandma stockings” topped off by rubber-soled black creepers pointed directly at the ceiling.

I rushed to her side and fell to my knees beside her and touched her arm thinking she was dead because her eyes were looking straight up and said, “Grandmother? Are you ok?”

She blinked and turned to focus on my face and asked, “Can you help me up?” Relieved that Grandmother was still alive and that I wouldn’t be blamed for killing my great-grandmother, I struggled to lift the chair back up to it’s upright position, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t lift her and the chair. She was not a small woman, but I knew she was old and frail and I needed to get her back up as soon as possible. I considered calling the fire department or the police, but since she seemed ok, I thought that might be overkill. All I really needed was a little bit of help to lift the chair and then everything would be ok. My heart was still pounding and I tried hard to think of what to do. It was the middle of the day and all of our neighbors were at work so no one was at home.

Then suddenly, I remembered my friend’s dad worked nights and they lived across the street, so I told Grandmother to be still and I would go and get help. I got to my feet and ran to the front door and opened it to a blast of hot air and saw the blue sky with white clouds when from behind me low and soft I heard my Grandmother call my name.

“Paul?” she called faintly and then again, “Paul?”

I froze for a second thinking that now she really was going to die. Perhaps it was a heart attack. I’d heard of family members who had passed away from heart attacks and now my own heart was racing again. I turned around and rushed back to where she lay on her back with her feet still sticking straight up in the air and fell to my knees once again and bent low so I could hear her words clearly in case she was giving me her last request. Oh, I just knew this was it. “88 Year Old Grandmother Dies While In The Care Of Her Great-Grandson Of A Heart Attack After Falling Backwards In A Chair,” which was a long headline I know, but it would probably make the front page. Worse yet, how would I tell my parents?

“Yes, Grandmother, I’m here, are you ok? Is there something you need? What can I do?” I told her hoarsely.

“Could you turn down the corner of the page I’m on in this book? It’s a good book and I don’t want to lose my place” she replied.

Stunned by her simple request and relieved that she didn’t appear to actually be dying, not that I would recognize that anyway, I turned the page down, got up and went across the street to get help. Our neighbor was home and after I explained the situation, he put on some shoes and followed me back across the street to my Grandmother with her legs still up in the air. I don’t know if he smiled or not when he saw her, but between the two of us, we got the chair upright and pulled Grandmother out of the chair and got her back to the couch. After he was satisfied that she was ok, he went back home and I finished fixing her lunch.

Not much was said about Grandmother And The Chair that night. I don’t know if Mom and Dad had a talk with her afterwards about doing what they told her not to do. I know that I would have probably gotten a lecture or a spanking if I had done something they told me not to do. But then again, perhaps they chose to let the experience be the teacher. What I can tell you is that we never had to worry about Grandmother sitting in the orange naugahyde chair anymore and in the end she outlasted the chair for she continued to visit long after the chair was gone.

There are many things I wish I could remember about Grandmother. The older I get the more precious the memories of that time with her become to me. Grandmother was a great wit and storyteller, a good cook, a loving great-grandparent, and my summertime friend. I believe there is a Heaven and somewhere in it is my Grandmother’s mansion. I also believe that in at least one of the rooms in that mansion, Grandmother has an orange naugahyde chair that she can sit in any time she wants.

Happy Mother’s Day!