A long time ago, I was stationed at Holloman AFB. I was a new First Lieutenant on my first operational assignment, and I was the boss of a team testing new aircraft navigation systems.
I had about a dozen top notch enlisted technicians, and the man who kept the team going the right direction was my right-hand man, TSgt Bill Mathias. Bill had been around, and he was a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is professional. We got along great, partially because I had been enlisted in a past life.
I had been on the job for a few months and, wanting to make my mark on things, I asked Bill to come into my office one Friday afternoon. I had some experience supervising and some knowledge of management, and I had a perception of how our outfit could perform better.
I had a plan to completely reorganize our section. As I explained my plan, Bill sat on the other side of my desk. He had a deadpan look on his face and I don’t believe he even blinked during my presentation.
Maybe he was thinking about the happy hour we were missing. I was soon to find out what he was thinking.
Happy with the thought and work I had put into my plan, I asked Bill, “Well, Bill, what do you think of my plan?” His answer came immediate, “With all due respect, sir, that is the worst f…..g idea I have ever heard.”
I am sure my face flushed, and I felt the hair stand up on my neck, as I fought for something to say. I felt belittled. Why was Bill being so insubordinate?! When I composed myself, I realized this was not insubordination at all. I had asked him what he thought, and he told me using the correct words, except possibly the F word, and with no uncertainty in his answer! I pulled myself together and managed a smile. Bill smiled back.
I ate the proverbial crow and said, “Alright, Bill, what’s wrong with it?” He pushed back his chair, crossed hi legs, and gave me a long tutorial on the unintended consequences if we implemented my ideas.
Bill kept me from looking like a fool and losing the respect of my men. But, since I was open to change, he felt comfortable in offering some different changes, something my predecessor had rejected.
They were welcomed by the men, and I became a hero and not a goat. I have carried this lesson with me throughout the rest of my military career and into the civilian world.
Find a person who will tell you the truth, and not just what you want to hear. Treasure that person, because the higher up the ladder you climb, those people are more and more rare.
Everybody needs a Sgt Mathais.
The days are getting longer, so we don’t have to feed the animals in the dark. The weather can’t make up its mind, warm one day, then cold the next
One of the sows had a litter of pigs a few nights ago, fourteen in all! Pop and I were in the farrowing pen as they were being born. As they were born, I would wipe each one down with a dry towel and put it on a nipple. They knew exactly what to do, and started nursing immediately! Some people might say “yuck”, but I felt good to be a part of the birthing. I would rub the sow on her side and tummy, and she would grunt softly, like she appreciated me being there. It was after midnight before Pop and I got to bed.
Next day I raked up two burlap sacks full of leaves for warm bedding for the pigs and put the leaves in the pen with the pigs and sow. The sow brought her pigs out of the farrowing pen today. All of the pigs look healthy. I fed her extra because they are nursing heavily.
I told Mr. Wagner, my agriculture teacher, about the pigs. We talked about it for a while. He said he would like to come out and see the pigs. He suggested that I raise a litter of pigs for my project next year. I really like him.
he new highway was finished from Hickory to Lenoir, so my school bus stop is about a quarter mile away, which is a shorter walk.
he Shipleys moved from Lenoir to the new development across the creek. They have a horse, so Gary and I ride together a lot. We do other things together also. It’s good to have a friend that is close. Junior Seagel moved last year and Uncle Fred moved to Gamewell with my cousins, and I was sort of by myself a while.
I took in my rabbit traps. Pop says the rabbits will start having babies soon, and we want to have plenty next fall. I wish I had more money, but I can’t sell rabbits anymore, and there aren’t any crops to pick. I will work with Bruce this summer building his houses, but he only needs me once in a while on Saturdays now.
One of the girls on the bus is Dottie Michaels, and I like her a lot. But she is older than me, and I think she has a boyfriend in Lenoir. I don’t think she will ever be my girlfriend, but we usually sit together on the bus.
Some of my friends at school are starting to talk about going to college, but I don’t plan to do that. I’ll probably work with Pop, Bruce and my other brothers building houses.
Maybe I’ll go in the military. All my brothers did. Bruce and Franklin were in the Army, Murray was in the Navy, and Rodney and Ira were in the Air Force. I like airplanes. We’ll see.
Murray says he is moving to Colorado. Maybe I could go with him. Maybe I could be a cowboy. I can ride horses pretty well.
For now, I’m here on the farm, and I’m OK with that.
It’s safe, and I guess I have everything I really need.
Boys in their early teens are dangerous.
You may think that the danger is less in quiet, rural areas, but that is not the case, at least around western North Carolina when the teenagers were my cousins and me.
At least this time we didn’t blow anything up, like we did with the homemade cannon. But that is a story for another time.
It was a hot day in July. We had been out of school for over a month, for which we were grateful, but we were running low on new adventures. Joe was wearing a cast on his arm from falling off a horse while we were playing cow pasture polo. Boyd had a bad case of poison oak. Dennis was recovering from multiple yellow jacket stings. I was still limping from my jump off the barn with my homemade parachute.
We needed to cure the summer boredom.
Dennis suggested we could see if we could trap something, which seemed like as good an idea as anybody else had. We didn’t have a shortage of critters, like possums, coons, skunks and the like. We got out one of our box traps we used to catch rabbits in the winter. Bait? Well most of the aforementioned critters would eat anything that smelled bad enough, so we pooled our resources and paid ten cents for a can of sardines. It was late in the day, and we set the trap down by the creek.
Next morning we hurried down to where the trap was and saw the door was down! Success! As we got close, we heard growling and hissing sounds coming from the trap. Carefully not to release our catch, I slid the door open just enough to see what we had. More growling. What I saw was the largest feral cat we had ever seen! A catch like that was good for some experiment. But what, and how do we get him out of the trap without getting body parts shredded, which the cat was letting us know in no uncertain terms that it was his intent?
A search around the barn gave us a pair of welders’ gloves and a burlap sack. Boyd held the sack tightly around the entrance to the trap, and between me holding the trap at an angle and Dennis encouraging the cat by pushing him out and into the sack, we succeeded. The cat was less happy in the sack than he had been in the trap, and he let us know that by his continuous snarling and occasionally hitting the sack and revealing half-inch claws poking through the fabric.
A fine animal, indeed, but what to do with him?
In a separate, but related part of the story, our rural route mail delivery man was Mr. Penley. Mr. Penley had been a sixth grade school teacher for a number of years. Three of the four of us had him as our teacher. He was universally disliked, seemed to dislike all of us, and seemed to dislike his job. We all wondered why he chose the profession. Everyone was relieved when he quit teaching.
After we thought as long and hard as is possible, a difficult task at best for four teenagers, we came up with a plan. We would have a surprise for Mr. Penley. The cat was far too big to fit into a regular size mail box, but grandma had one of the big mail boxes. The mail usually came early in the afternoon, so we carried out our plan about noon.
Again, using the welders’ gloves and sack top around grandma’s mailbox, we managed to get the cat in the mailbox with little blood loss. We bent down the catch to make sure the cat could not prematurely open it, otherwise our sinister revenge against the evil Mr. Penley would not work.
The cat liked the inside of the mailbox even less than the sack or the box trap, which he announced by growling regularly. He probably had a dislike for the hot tin of the mailbox, too.
At least Mr. Penley was punctual, so he wouldn’t be there for long.
The bushes on the other side of the road gave us concealment, but also gave us a view of the mailbox and the path Mr. Penley would have to drive. While we waited an occasional growl could be heard from the mailbox.
We waited with great anticipation.
So far, our plan was working better than most of our summer adventures.
Finally, the rusty red of Mr. Penley’s Pontiac came into view. He dropped off mail at the Smith’s box, and Grandma’s was next! Mr. Penley seemed content to have a job away from children, or anyone else, for that matter, as he steered the Pontiac from the right seat up to Grandma’s mailbox.
But the serene look on his face soon became one of stark terror as he lowered the door of the mail box. The cat did not wait for the door to be completely open before he battered the door the rest of the way down as he lunged toward freedom. I guess the cat was somewhat disoriented when he found himself inside the Pontiac with a screaming man, because he made several laps around the inside of the car before he made his exit out the driver’s side window.
He was a blur as he streaked by the bushes we were hiding behind. Mr. Penley sat for several minutes with his hands shaking as he rested them on the dash. I don’t think he ever put any mail in the box. He slowly drove away but stopped in the woods just up the road. I don’t know why.
Maybe it was to sort the mail after he was flailing around in the car.
If we got bored later that summer, we would go up to grandma’s mailbox, put the flag up, and wait for Mr. Penley.
He would always lower the door of the mailbox very slowly. If we were there “waiting for the mail,” we always got a scowl. I told you he didn’t like kids!
There are personalities in every small town and rural communities in the south, maybe everywhere. George Hartley was one of them. George was one of my father’s peers, which would make him born somewhere around the turn of the century.
There were a lot of rumors about George, but at least all of them would put him in the eccentric category. He liked people. He even liked teenagers, as witness to the fact that he even liked me and Junior Seagle. Junior lived right down the hill from George, and I was about a fifteen minute walk from both. Rumors were that George had been a major league baseball player that got kicked off the team for excessive drinking, which was quite a feat, since all baseball players followed Babe Ruth’s lead of being drunk most of the time.
George supposedly saved enough money before he got fired to move back to North Carolina and buy a farm. Anyway, whether from his time playing baseball or profits from his chicken farm, George had plenty of money for that time and place. George never married either, which could have been a factor. He was what we would call, in sort of a redneck way, an eligible bachelor, but that is a story for another time.
Hudson, North Carolina, was not the center of the universe for thirteen year old boys out on summer vacation. We had three months to fill up with mischief, mayhem, and adventure of our own device, since we didn’t have any bureaucracy to direct our endeavors.
Of course we had fishing, swimming – no pools, just creeks – baseball if we could get enough participants, and anything that would enable us to avoid hoeing the garden or other mundane chores our parents planned to keep us out of trouble.
Junior and I were mostly recovered from our last misadventure and wondering how to stave off the boredom of a hot August afternoon. We both liked watermelon, but neither of our parents grew them.
But George did! His patch was down near gunpowder creek, about 200 yards from his house. We figured George would be in his house trying to stay out of the midday heat. Staying out of sight of the house, we got into the trees down by the creek and surveyed the situation. Certain that we were safely out of site, we sneaked to the edge of the woods, identified our quarry, and put a sneak on the best looking watermelon we could spot that would keep us out of sight of the Hartley house. Junior cut the stem with his Barlow pocket knife, and we were off to our preselected hiding place beside the creek with our purloined catch. We had done it, as well any of the bank robbers on Saturday morning TV!
The pocket knife was not a match for a fat watermelon, so we ended up having to break it open, but there it was, the juicy, pink center! Warmed by the sun or not, we had our watermelon! We told ourselves we had stolen the best watermelon on earth. In our elation, we had failed to notice the shadowy figure that had crept to a large beech tree beside the creek. How could this happen?! It was George! Did he have a gun? The penalty for stealing watermelons was being shot, even if it is with only rock salt!
But he didn’t have a gun, and he didn’t look particularly angry, so what torture did he have planned, besides telling our parents? At last he spoke. “Boys, that watermelon is hot from being out in this sun, and it isn’t quite ripe. I was planning to pick this patch next week. Now y’all come on with me up to the house.”
Was that where he kept his bullwhip? Was then sheriff waiting? Whatever, we had been caught and we had no choice but to face our fate. He told us to sit in the lawn chairs under the big oak in his yard. I knew then what it would be like to be on death row. “Yall wait here”, George said. “I’ll be right back.”
He went in the house, probably to get his gun or some implement of torture. I was right, it was something to inflict torture, because what he brought out was a watermelon! “I was saving this for company, so I guess this is it. This one is nice and chilled, and good and ripe,” he said as he sliced it open with the butcher knife. He cut off a large slice for both of us. Siting there with George as he talked about farming and the weather, seemingly like nothing ever happened, was sheer torture.
When we had finished our slice, George looked at his watch and said, ‘Now y’all run along. ‘Bout time for me to go feed the chickens. Come on back if you want another watermelon.”
Happenings that afternoon were lessons I have carried with me throughout my life.
One of witnessing and accepting forgiveness.
One of understanding that small transgressions are less important than relationships.
One that enjoyment should not be at someone else’s expense.
Seven years later, George vouched for me when the Air Force was investigating my background for my Secret security clearance.
