By JOEL WILSON
First off, I need to thank all those who offered tips and recipes on biscuit making. I even got some suggestions on which frozen ones to buy and where I could find them.
The easiest one, and I'm told the best one, comes from my friend Vickie at the drugstore. It involves only flour and whipping cream. If I get up the courage, that’s the one I’m going to try, but in the meanwhile, I’m going to the store in search of the frozen kind.
In another piece of old business, I need to thank Ruth Mitchell Dunker, who e-mailed me after reading a column mentioning her and growing up on Cleveland Avenue. She remembered that her dad, the late Roy Rutledge, also gave free haircuts during the lean years in and around the Depression. One of the store’s customers would stop by and Mr. Rutledge would put down his tools and give a pretty professional-looking haircut. I wouldn’t advise dropping by a service station these days and asking for the same kind of favor.
I often run into folks who grew up during the same era as me and talking old times is always enjoyable. I dropped by our fishing reporter Bill Logsdon’s place of business this week and David McDaniel happened to be there. He’s a bit younger than me, but I went to high school with his sister Sondra. The three of us began spinning tales about some of our youthful indiscretions, like skipping school.
That dredged up a personally painful memory for me, one that happened during the first week of my senior year in high school. Several friends decided to skip school and attend the State Fair. Needless to say, we were found out when one of the guy’s mother came by school looking for him when he didn’t show up to do his after-school chores.
The next day, our principal, one Mr. Edwin Jones, rounded us up and meted out our punishment. Among the options included a paddling or detention ... we called it staying after school. I knew that if I stayed after school, I would be late for football practice and would have to run laps, so I opted for the paddle. As it turned out, the coach heard about the skipping and because I also missed practice that day, I ended up running laps for a week anyway. By now you’ve figured out we weren’t the sharpest pencils in the drawer.
Mr. Jones re-introduced me to his paddle for the second time just before the Christmas break, but this time I had company. It began with a friendly scuffle with a buddy, but when the play got too rough, it turned into a mini-brawl in a classroom. Some desks got overturned, a nose got bloodied and a few knots were raised before our social studies teacher, Carter Hooks, stepped in.
After we got our comeuppance from Mr. Jones, we apologized to each other because we had been good friends before and we were good friends after.
Bill grew up in Hardin County and attended Vine Grove High School. He recounted a similar tale about taking a day off his senior year, a short time before graduation. His principal handed him a book on U.S. government and told him if he wanted to graduate, he would have to pass a test on the book a few days later.
David allowed that if his children had done some of the things he had done in his youth, he didn't know what he would have done to them.
But these youthful missteps seem tame indeed compared to some of the stuff you hear about these days. We didn’t trash other kids on the Web or want to be a cheerleader so badly that a competitor might actually be hurt.
Nobody ever heard of carrying a gun to school or some of the other insane things that are happening today.
The ’50s were a great time to grow up here in Glasgow. We didn’t occupy ourselves with computer games. During the day, we were playing some sort of ball in a neighborhood lot, swimming at the pool on the North Jackson or in some creek where there was a rope tied in a tree on the bank.
And on hot summer nights, we were outside playing kick the can or riding our bikes to the Trigg or the Plaza. And if we were lucky, catching a ride to the Star Drive-In where that big corkscrew sliding board beckoned.
Yep, those were the days. Kind of makes you miss Richie and Fonzie and Happy Days doesn’at it?
