My Thirty-five Years as an Exiled Arkie of the Covenant II

“To flee despair and light out for the territories loses the moral universe and thus makes us atoms of self, prisoners of inheritance, not free at all.”
(The same is true of being exiled in the [Indian] territories for thirty-five years!)
—Clay Lewis, Battlegrounds of Memory

In this post I continue and conclude the two-post series of select anecdotes about the thirty-five years of my “Oklahomian Exile” from my home state of Arkansas.

Specifically, I conclude my responses to attacks against Arkansas and Arkies by Okies who for some reason seem to derive great perverted pleasure from berating and belittling my beloved homeland.

So here are several final examples of my responses to such questions and statements.

“You’re Can’t Be from Arkansas
‘cause You’re Wearing Shoes!”

Mari and I attended a Lenten meeting at our church, Trinity Episcopal in Tulsa. The service was led by an Anglican nun named Sister Ellie.

During her presentation I couldn’t help noticing that Sister Ellie didn’t have any shoes on. I wondered about it, and obviously so did the rector (pastor) who asked her about it.

She explained that going barefoot was a requirement of her order, in conformity to the divine injunction to Moses to remove his footwear because of the holiness of the place on which he stood. (See Exodus 3:5.)

Immediately I realized that I finally had a response to Okies who would say to me, “You can’t be from Arkansas ‘cause you’re wearing shoes!”

“The reason I’m wearing shoes,” I now explain sadly but politely, “is because I’m no longer walking on holy ground.”

Mount Magazine, the highest point in Arkansas (to magnify, click on the photo from Jenkins Enterprises, North Little Rock, AR 501-945-2600)

By the way, during that service Sister Ellie taught on her order’s strict requirement of poverty, chastity, and exile from home.

In response to her remarks I was moved to ask: “In view of our financial situation (mine and Mari’s) and our advancing age, and our twenty years here in Oklahoma, do poverty, chastity, and exile count as virtues . . . if they are involuntary?”

In deference to her person and position, I am afraid that Sister Ellie’s response must remain confidential.

“Why Do You Arkies Talk So Funny?”

Sometimes Okies, whose accents are as varied and their erratic behavior, will chide me about my Arkansas accent—especially when I use some rural South Arkansas expression such as “ain’t.”

When they do, I am quick to remind them that one of my three folk heroes (besides Elvis Presley and Robert E. Lee), their own Will Rogers, often used “ain’t”—not only in his speech and quotes but also in his newspaper columns and other writings.

Then I also remind them of what famed Arkie baseball pitcher and sports announcer Dizzy Dean used to say when criticized for using that particular word: “There’s lotsa fokes that ain’t sayin’ ain’t that ain’t workin’!”

When I am “corrected” by an Okie for such practice, my response is: “That’s jus’ th’ way us Arkies tawk. Me ’n’ them’s got to keep some vestige of Suthrun birth and upbrangin’!”

However, occasionally I encounter an Okie who actually has enough linguistic and cultural knowledge and taste to appreciate the beauty and grace of an Arkansas accent.

One of these sophisticated Okies I met at our church in Tulsa decades ago in a program called the Episcopal Women Road Show.

In this presentation a group of ladies dress as several Old Testament women and relate their personal stories.

On that particular night the biblical women were Eve, Mrs. Noah, Sarah, and Hagar.

After their individual portrayals, the ladies each answered questions from the audience in character.

That’s when I asked “Eve”: “If you’re supposed to be from the Garden of Eden, how come you don’t have an Arkansas accent?”

She didn’t hesitate or bat an eye. She merely and meekly replied with sorrowful downcast eyes, “The loss of my accent was part of the curse of being driven from Paradise.”

I know the feeling! Except that I have made every effort for thirty-five years to make sure not to lose a bit of my native Arkansas accent. Like the Razorback caps and shirts I wear, my accent is my way of letting everyone know that I am not an Okie, I’m an Arkie—and proud of it!

(For more on this subject, see my earlier posts titled “Keep Arkansas in the Accent” and “Some Southern Stuff IV: Do You Speak Southern?”)

“Arkansas Traveler? What Is That Supposed to Mean?”

Not long ago during the sports portion of a local Tulsa TV news program, the young male “anchor” reported the final score between the Tulsa Drillers baseball team and the Northwest Arkansas Naturals.

“Naturals?” the obviously uninformed “anchor” said with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t even know what that is!”

I debated about informing him that it is a name derived from the slogan of the state of Arkansas: “The Natural State.” (To read more about the name of this team, click here.)  (To read more about the Natural State, click here.)

The Welcome to Arkansas: The Natural State sign that appears at every highway entrance into the state (to magnify, click on the photo from the cover of Arkansas Destinations, Fall & Winter issue)

Now in this case, who was displaying his ignorance? Or at least his laziness in not Googling the term before he “put it down” on regional television?

But ignorance of Arkansas and facts about it (often accompanied with arrogance) is not confined to young TV sports “anchors.” Following is an example from “the print media.”

Some years ago in defense of cockfighting an Okie (who shall remain anonymous) wrote a letter to the editor of the Tulsa World stating that Arkansas Travelers were not people “but are a breed of gamecock that was bred and traveled by Arkansas soldiers during the Civil War.”

Of course, I had no choice but to write the World and let its readers know that that old dog won’t hunt.

The original painting of the Arkansas Traveler (to magnify, click on the photo from the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture; see link in copy)

For one thing, I noted, there was at the time a famous Arkansas newspaper column called the Arkansas Traveler which had been in existence for decades and which was written by Charles Allbright, a native of my hometown of McGehee, Arkansas.

Then I went on to state that there was also the Little Rock baseball team, to say nothing of each of the two million plus blessed citizens of the Natural State—all of them Arkansas Travelers.

“It will come as a big surprise to them,” I concluded, “to learn they are all roosters!”

Note: What I didn’t have time or space to get into was the origin of the term “The Arkansas Traveler” which dates back to the 1840s. It is a famous (or perhaps infamous) bit of Arkansas folklore about a traveler on horseback who encounters a rustic Arkie sitting outside his cabin and sawing on a fiddle trying to play the popular tune of the day, also aptly called “The Arkansas Traveler.” (To hear this song played on fiddle and guitar, click here.)  (To read all about this tale and the tune, click here.) This tune should be familiar to everyone since it is almost always played to give a musical impression of rusticity, as in that famous scene from the movie Deliverance. (To hear the song as played in Deliverance, click here.)

“Just Where Is Arkansas Anyway?”

But ignorance about Arkansas is not limited to Oklahoma, of course, as we learned when we lived in South Carolina where even college teachers thought Arkansas had deserts and cactus (i.e., Arizona)! There are people right in this country who don’t even know where Arkansas is located.

One of them, believe it or not, was a former U.S. president!

The regions of Arkansas with the state’s visitor centers (to magnify, click on the photo from Living in Arkansas magazine)

Let me explain. Some time ago in a news article about satellite dishes, there was a map showing Little Rock as one of five cities that would soon be receiving Direct Broadcast television. Two other cities were Tulsa and Albuquerque.

After viewing that map I wrote the editor of the newspaper noting:

“Mari and I wondered whether placing Tulsa in Kansas and Albuquerque in Arizona qualified the artist as a graduate of the George Bush School of Geography.”

That was George Bush Senior who once referred to his opponent Bill Clinton as the governor of a certain state “between Oklahoma and Texas.” Of course, the fact is that Arkansas lies to the east of Oklahoma and Texas and not between them!

Political cartoon showing George Bush pointing out Arkansas “between Oklahoma and Texas” (to magnify, click on the photo of the cartoon by Vic Harville in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

Speaking of geography, I once wrote to an Arkansas newspaper about one of our return trips from “down home” in Southeast Arkansas back to Northeast Oklahoma, which I noted is “uphill all the way”:

“As we got in the car, we heard a flock of geese going over. The geese were headin’ south and we were headin’ north, which proves that we Peacocks ain’t got the sense God gave a goose.”

Neither do some other people—especially some Okies—when it comes to identifying Arkansas and Arkansas Travelers.

“Why Are Arkies So Witty?”

Just as Oklahoma has its famed humorist Will Rogers, so Arkansas has more than its share of witty and clever humorists.

In recognition of this fact, C. L. Edson once wrote:

“But wit is so common in Arkansas that it does not distinguish a man—not while he is in Arkansas. It is the tradition of the land.”

So when Okies ask me why I left Arkansas if it is so great, I say that I had to leave “‘cause ‘back down home’ ever’body’s a wit—and them who ain’t are like Okies, either half-wits or nit-wits!”

“Why Is Arkansas So Religious?”

In answer to that question,I like to tell the story I once wrote up for an Arkansas audience.

In this story, I began with a question posed to Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies by Miss Jane Hathaway: “Is it true what I heard about Jethro, that he went to Eton at an early age?”

“Oh, yes ma’am,” Jed replied proudly. “That boy went to eatin’ right off.”

For much of our lives, more than forty years in fact, like the majority of Arkies of our day Mari and I were Southern Baptists.

But later here in Oklahoma for a period of about twenty years we were active members of the Episcopal Church.

So active that I was elected by my home parish, Trinity Episcopal Church in Tulsa, to serve as a delegate to the 1999 convention of the Diocese of Oklahoma.

That convention was to be held in the lovely town of Duncan, southwest of Oklahoma City.

I couldn’t wait to write back to Arkansas and inform the good Southern Baptist folks back down home, “Guess what! Here in Oklahoma the Episcopalians are gonna go to dunkin’.”

“Why Do Arkies See Humor in Everything?”

Humor, like wit, is an integral part of the Arkie nature. Maybe it’s because our sense of humor has helped us to get through so many hardships and difficult times in the past—and to respond to so many “cute” remarks and outright insults from others.

As wonderful as it is to be Arkies and as proud as we Arkies are of our state and our heritage, to paraphrase Kermit the frog, the truth is that it’s not always easy to be an Arkie—especially when traveling, and particularly living, out of state.

In closing these two posts on the thirty-five years of my Oklahomian Exile, here is an example of the type of stories that have been told to me by often good-natured and well-meaning Okies.

This one goes like this:

An Arkie and an Okie are driving down the highway in an unfamiliar area.

Suddenly the Okie says, “I’m hongry. Pull over to that there store over yonder.”

Once inside the store he tells the clerk, “Gimme some taters ’n’ maters ’n’ nanners.”

The clerk responds, “You must be from Oklahoma.”

“How’dju know that?” the Okie asks in awe.

“Because you said ‘taters’ and ‘maters’ and ‘nanners.’”

The Okie can’t wait to get back to the car to tell the Arkie. “That fella in there knew I wuz a Okie ‘cause ‘a how I tawked.”

Amused, the Arkie decided he would try it so he told the Okie. “Pull over at the next store we come to.”

The Okie did so, and the Arkie got out, went inside, and told the clerk. “Gimme some taters ’n’ maters ’n’ nanners.”

The clerk grinned broadly. “You must be from Arkansas.”

“How’d you know that, ‘cause ‘a how I tawked?”

“No,” the clerk replied. “I knew it because this is a furniture store.”

But lest I end this fascinating Arkie-Okie linguistic and cultural treatise with a negative impression of Arkansas and Arkies, here is an amusing true story I clipped from the local Sapulpa, Oklahoma, newspaper:

“An elderly peeping tom interrupted a Sapulpa resident’s shower Tuesday, according to a police report.”

It turned out that the victim was a thirty-three-year-old man.

“He was taking a shower when he noticed his elderly female neighbor peeking at him through the bathroom window.”

The “peeking Thomas” (actually a “peeping Thomasina”) was about seventy-nine or eighty years old.

The newspaper report concluded:

“The man told police that when he yelled at his neighbor to get back out of his yard, she yelled back at him, ‘No wonder your wife divorced you!’—and fled. No arrests have been made.”

Yep, ‘ats ‘em Okies aw rite! Bless their pore ignernt hearts.

My Thirty-five Years as an Exiled Arkie of the Covenant I

“I moved from the Holy Land (Arkansas) to Babylon (Oklahoma) in 1977 (the year that King Elvis died, see Isaiah 6:1) to take a much-needed job in religious publishing. If ever a man put his hand to the plow looking back, it is me. I only miss home two times: night and day!”
—Jimmy Peacock 

When I found myself in “exile” in Oklahoma in 1977, thirty-five years ago, I began to write humorous and nostalgic, and sometimes poignant and sentimental, pieces about my exile, most of them with a spiritual or scriptural theme.

It was sometime during that thirty-five-year period that I began to refer to these writings in biblical terms as “My Oklahomian Exile Literature.” It is that collection of writings that I have been presenting in weekly posts on this blog.

In the next two posts I would like to share with you some more of these brief anecdotes, many of them expressions of my ongoing defense of my beloved native state of Arkansas. I hope you will enjoy this selection of some of the best of these literary missives and missiles as I continue to pour out my heart and soul in my words and writing.

In this first post I respond to some typical questions and statements from Okies about Arkansas and her people.

“If Arkansas Is So Wonderful . . .?” 

When an Okie asks me, “If Arkansas is so wonderful, why are you living in Oklahoma?” I always reply: “You call yourself a Christian, and you have never heard of foreign missions?”

(Incidentally, that statement is literally true since the job that brought me from Southeast Arkansas to Tulsa so long ago was as a French-English translator for an international Christian missionary organization.)

Then I usually add: “Oh, but Oklahoma is okay. Why it’s next to heaven!”

A topographical map of Arkansas showing the major land features such as the Ozark Mountains and the Ouachita Mountains in the north and west (upper and lower left) and the Gulf Coastal Plain and the Mississippi River Delta in the east and south (upper and lower right and center), Arkansas’ location in the U.S., and miles to different major cities (to magnify, click on the photo from Living in Arkansas magazine)

“Why Do Oklahomans Say ‘Over in Arkansas’?” 

Several years ago an Okie wrote to the editor of the Tulsa World:

“I am fascinated with the phrase ‘over in Arkansas.’ I hear it from TV weathermen and newscasters. Never ‘over’ into Texas or Kansas. What is there about Arkansas that you go ‘over into’?”

Then he went on to elaborate:

“The jet stream usually goes west to east; the Pilgrims went east to west; the Gulf air goes south to north, and the Canadian air masses go north to south. No answer here. Why do we go ‘over into Arkansas’?”

Of course, provided such an opportunity to offer a bit of enlightenment on a subject that is near and dear to my heart, I was quick to write a responding letter to the editor of the Tulsa World to answer that burning question:

“The reason Oklahomans go over into Arkansas is the same reason that the Children of Israel went over (Jordan) into the Promised Land. It is also the reason why, when we devout Arkies of the Covenant are uprooted, we tell our Okie pilgrims, ‘Thou art not far from the kingdom, over in Arkansas.’”

As far as I know, the Okie never responded to my explanation.

“Why Is Arkansas So Poor, Ignorant, and Uneducated?”

As an example of the way Okies often make disparaging remarks about Arkansas, here is what an Oklahoma newspaper columnist once wrote after spending only five months in Fort Smith:

“Arkansas is another country. I experienced none of that legendary Southern charm. I saw only a state that is mired in poverty and ignorance, with an educational standard that is next to last in the country.”

(What is both ironic and tragic is that it is Oklahoma, and not Arkansas, that now holds the distinction of being forty-ninth in education!)

Then the Okie columnist went on to write:

“Arkansas is a beautiful state. But . . . . Arkansans don’t seem to have the concern Oklahomans do for their environment. The minute I hit the Arkansas state line, I begin to miss Oklahoma.”

An Arkansas Ozark Mountain scene in autumn (to magnify, click on the photo taken from Living in Arkansas magazine)

Again, I could not let that kind of attack against my beloved home state go unanswered, so I responded:

“That’s funny because the moment I hit the Oklahoma state line, I begin to miss Arkansas!”

Then I added: “I am reminded of an observation by Harry Ashmore, a native of South Carolina and Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Arkansas Gazette. ‘To the practiced ear, Arkansans, when explaining their peculiar ways to outsiders, sound as though they are accustomed to dealing with fools, but are too polite to say so.’”

So true to form, I was too much of an Arkie and a Southern Gentleman to say that I was dealing with a fool. I also refrained from stating that the person who made those disparaging statements about my native homeland was—at best—only an average Okie as indicated in a daily Bible Thought that I saw in the Tulsa World about that time:

“Dearly beloved, average not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Romans 12:19.”

So although as a Christian gentleman I could not avenge myself, I could not refrain from writing the World:

“Perhaps your version of Romans 12:19 sets forth an equally applicable principle in this age of mediocrity. I have come to adopt the point of view that when it comes to intelligence, the average person falls way below average.”

I could have added, “Especially any average Okie who has the audacity and the impudence, to say nothing of the lack of good manners, to attack an innocent geographical neighbor without cause or provocation.”

One of my endless self-quotes is that my devout Southern Baptist mother taught me to be honest and to be a gentleman. She just never taught me how to do both at the same time!

But even with those maternal constraints I do what I can to defend the honor of my sainted motherland, remembering the words of an earlier Arkie who warned: “God loves not him who loves not Arkansas!”

“In the Civil War Neither Side Wanted Arkansas!”

Here is an even more serious and despicable example of an anti-Arkansas attack from an Okie to which I felt obligated to respond on behalf of my fellow Arkies who probably never saw it in print:

Some time ago an Okie wrote a letter to the editor of theTulsa World in which he stated:

“The two Arkansas products most reported in the Oklahoma press these days are Bill Clinton in the capital and chicken manure in the Illinois River.”

He went on to quote an anecdote that appeared in Carl Sandberg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln:

“The cause of the (Civil) War in its later phases was given in a folk tale of Lincoln and Jeff Davis meeting on neutral ground and deciding the war by dividing the territory and stopping the fighting. Lincoln took the Northern states and Davis the Gulf and seaboard Southern states. Lincoln took Texas and Missouri and Davis Kentucky and Tennessee, so that all were parceled off except Arkansas.

“The leaders were said to have backed off when it came to Arkansas.

“Lincoln didn’t want it─Jeff wouldn’t have it─neither would consent to take it.

“So what happened? On that they split; and the war has been going on ever since.”

A brochure featuring a cover photo of a reenactment of a Civil War battle in Arkansas (to magnify, click on the photo from the Department of Arkansas Heritage)

Of course, I could not let that salacious attack on Arkansas go unchallenged. So I wrote to the editor of the Tulsa World:

“As a native Arkansan living in Oklahoma for 21 years I cannot refrain from commenting on today’s letter citing Carl Sandberg in attributing the continuation of the Civil War to an alleged dispute between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.

“The truth is that both Lincoln and Davis greatly wanted Arkansas, witness the fact that they each sent several thousand troops into the state to fight and die for it. To reduce to a rude and offensive farce the tragic struggle and sacrifice of these men is an unconscionable affront not only to them but to all those who honor their courage and devotion.”

A statue in the Confederate Cemetery in Historic Helena, Arkansas, which produced five generals for the Confederacy; such monuments are a common sight in many Arkansas towns and cities (to magnify, click on the photo from a postcard purchased at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena)

I went on to cite a quote from Alan C. Paulson’s Roadside History of Arkansas about the state “which was known as a land of opportunity before the rebellion [i.e., the Civil War].”

I also quoted Peter Applebone of the New York Times who noted: “If any place can engender a sense of being permanently dissed, it’s Arkansas.”

I concluded by quoting native South Carolinian and Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River, who wrote: “Deep in the Arkansas conscious is a tragic sense that across nearly three centuries of existence as a colony, territory and state its people have been misunderstood and put upon.”

I repeat such exchanges on this blog simply to illustrate the fact that after thirty-five years in exile I am still fighting the good fight of faith─defending Arkansas.

“Do We Want Our Country to Look Like Arkansas?”

Years ago the now defunct Tulsa Tribune printed an editorial under the headline “Go Easy on Arkansas.”

In that article the Tribune noted that Marilyn Quale had just unleashed her rhetorical blast, “Do we want our country to look like Arkansas?”

If you don’t remember Marilyn Quale, she was the wife of Dan Quale, the Republican vice-presidential candidate under George Bush who was opposed by Bill Clinton of Arkansas, the Democratic presidential candidate for president.

The Tulsa editorial admitted, “She might as well have answered herself with a resounding ‘Yuk!’”

It then went on to describe Arkansas and comment on “its beautiful lakes and rivers, its lovely hills and hollows, quaint towns and the lovable phoniness of its many tourist attractions.”

Greers Ferry Lake at Heber Springs, Arkansas (to magnify, click on the photo from a postcard by Jenkins Enterprises, North Little Rock, AR 501-945-2600)

It noted that Okies know that Arkansas is more than all that.

“They know the delights of an Arkansas catfish dinner with fried potatoes, fresh tomatoes, green onions and cornbread with a bowl of pinto beans on the side. They know friendly people who aren’t too hurried to engage in a conversation with a stranger.”

In closing, the Tribune stated, “Clinton may be fair game for the Republicans, but they should be a bit more balanced in talking about his state.”

In view of such an unusual defense of Arkansas by an Oklahoma newspaper, it raises the question of whether that kind of unbiased reporting about a friendly neighbor might be one reason the Tulsa Tribune is no longer in existence.

“Can Anything Good Come Out of Arkansas?”

While carrying on this three-decade-long defense of my much beloved and much maligned native state, in my capacity as a religious copyeditor I began to refer to myself by various biblical-based titles, such as: “An Arkie in Whom There Is No Guile,” “The Defender of the Holy Land,” and “The Prophet from Arkansas.”

Of course, these self-composed titles sometimes prompted the equally scriptural though spiritually judgmental question: “Can anything good come out of Arkansas?”

To which I always respond, “Maybe not, ‘cause I must have been a terrible sinner to be driven out of the Promised Land and banished here to Purgatory!”

In my next post I will present some more positive, or at least more amusing and less confrontational, anecdotes about Arkansas and Oklahoma and Arkies and Okies.

So tune in next week, folks, the fun is just beginning.

Humorous Quotes from Others

“Writers are exorcists of their own demons.”
(This is my favorite quote—it’s what I am doing when I write,
and when I share it on this blog.)
—Mario Vargas Llosa

“A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.”
(I wish this was true in my own life!)
—Gustave Flaubert

The quotes above from my collection of humorous (and not so humorous) quotations explain precisely why I write humorously about the painful events in my life.

As I have noted several times in this blog, and particularly in the preceding post on some of my collected self-quotes, it is through my writings over the past thirty-five years of my Oklahomian Exile (and indeed the entire forty years of what I call the “Peacock Curse”) that I deal with the issues of my life.

In this post I continue that practice by sharing some of my collected humorous (and not so humorous) quotes from others (including humorous newspaper comic strips), some of which may have appeared in earlier posts. As always, my comments are set in parentheses.

Humorous Quotes from Others

“Humor plays close to the big hot fire that is truth.”

—E. B. White

“Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.”

—Langston Hughes (1902-1967), quoted in
History magazine, September/October 2009

“Humor is to life what shock absorbers are to automobiles.”

—Juanita Taylor, “Author adds a laugh track to tough time,”
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, nd, quoting Rev. Stan Toler,
God Has Never Failed Me,
But He’s Sure Scared Me to Death a Few Times!

“It’s been said that humor is our shield against insanity.” (If that’s so then maybe I ain’t so crazy after all!)

—Jaime O’Neill, “Grapes of Wrath redux?” Tulsa World, 09/18/11

“You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.” (I have found humor in most of my painful situations, but I have never turned any of them around through laughter.)

—Bill Cosby, quoted in the Sapulpa Daily Herald

“I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” (But as Charlie Brown once said elsewhere, I’m already down to half-days!)

—Charlie Brown in Charles Shultz’ Peanuts cartoon,
Today’s Cryptoquote, Tulsa World, 01-12-11

“Charlie Brown . . . is such a loser. He wasn’t even the star of his own Halloween special.” (I know the feeling, Charlie Brown! At my memorial service everybody will probably be talking about my beautiful widow–including me, wherever I am!)

–Chris Rock, Celebrity Quote,
Tulsa World, 11-01-12

“In my belief, you cannot deal with the most serious things in life unless you also understand the most amusing.”

—Winston Churchill

“Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.”

—Elsa Maxwell, American socialite (1863-1963),
Thought for the Day, Sapulpa Daily Herald, nd

“It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.” (So that’s my purpose in life!)

—Quote from anonymous forwarded email

“Nobody ever died of laughter.”

—Max Beerbohm, English critic and essayist (1872-1958),
Thought for the Day, Sapulpa Daily Herald, nd

“The sound of laughter has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the universe.”

—Peter Ustinov

“What this country needs is a good humorist. There’s been no one since Will Rogers.” (That’s what I would like to be—the Will Rogers of Arkansas.)

—Herbert Hoover

“If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot!” (My feelings exactly about most “modern art”!)

—Harry S. Truman

“If a man wants his dreams to come true, he must wake up.”

—Anonymous

“I did not attend the funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

—Mark Twain (1835-1910), quoted on desk calendar
for March 17, St. Patrick’s Day

“Should I go home, or should I just go crazy?” (You can guess which one I have done!)

—Lyrics of country song heard on the radio in August 2001

“Might as well . . . can’t dance.” (In the case of Mari and me, that is still literally true!)

—1950s Ouachita Baptist College student saying

“Welcome to the South!—now go home!”
“Save the South—teach a Yankee to drive!”
“I miss my ex-wife—but my aim is getting better!”
“You don’t deserve to dream!” (I laughed out loud when I saw this one years ago.)

—Southern bumper stickers

“Discourage inbreeding, ban country music.”

—Bumper sticker seen on car in Wal-Mart parking lot

“When did my wild oats become all bran?”

—Bumper sticker seen in McGehee, Arkansas

“You might be a redneck if . . . your wife has a Jell-O mold that looks like Elvis.”

—Jeff Foxworthy, quoted on desk calendar

“Yeah, but not enough to git in th’ way of my pickin’.”

—Arkansan Glen Campbell in response to question:
“Can you read music?”

“Satan thought he had us, but now he’s on the run.
The devil’s in the phone booth dialing 911!”

—Southern Gospel song

“After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.” (And I’m seventy-four! When I asked Mari why all the pretty young girls smile at me now but didn’t when I was young, she said, “It’s because they know you’re harmless—and because you’re so homely!”)

—Ed Howe, Today’s Cryptoquote, Tulsa World, 01-31-01

“Grandkids are fine—ask me about my medical problems.” (I have a lot more of those than I do grandkids—and that’s no joke!)

—Bumper sticker on back of old man’s car
in Bizarro cartoon, Tulsa World, nd

Humorous Newspaper Cartoons

If you know me personally, or if you have read my personal blog posts at all, you will probably understand why I chose these particular newspaper cartoons. Hint: They all relate in some way or another to my own life and situation either now or in the past.

“I don’t get it . . . After all the budget cuts to streamline the work force, why aren’t we making any progress?”

—Four CEO-types around staff table
on quarterdeck of huge Roman galley
with only one poor oarsman,
Non Sequitur cartoon, Tulsa World, 11-29-06

“Well, the budget cuts appear to have worked on expenses, Hoskins, but do you have any idea why production is down?”

—CEO to overworked accountant at empty staff table,
Non Sequitur cartoon, Tulsa World, 03-21-07

“I lost my job.”
“Your last job was 100 years ago.”
“It’s really lost.”

—Conversation between the witch Broom Hilda
and another cartoon character,
Broom Hilda cartoon, Tulsa World, 2001

Lieutenant Fuzz, saluting General Halftrack: “Have a superfragilisticexpialidocious day, sir!”
General Halftrack to Captain beside him: “Brevity is not his strong point.” (Nor mine.)

—Beatle Bailey cartoon, Tulsa World, 07-08-ny

Ralph on phone: “Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”
Ralph’s wife: “Ralph, what’s wrong?”
Ralph: “My friend Marv died!”
Ralph’s wife: “Marv?? Good heavens!”
Ralph: “I’m stunned! Marv was only my age! He was just a young man!”
Ralph’s teenage son: “I thought you said he was your age.” (I know the feeling!)

—Drabble cartoon, Tulsa World, 07-01-96

Peppermint Patti: “I’m trying, Marcie, but I’m still doing lousy in school.”
Marcy: “Maybe you need to eat a better breakfast, sir, or have your eyes checked or start going to bed earlier.”
Peppermint Patti: “You’ve never understood, have you, Marcie, that when a person complains, he doesn’t want a solution, he wants sympathy!” (I would have said “understanding.”)
Marcy: “No, I admit I’ve never understood that, sir.”
Peppermint Patti: “Stop calling me ‘sir’!”

—Peanuts cartoon, Tulsa World, nd

Frank to businessman reading the newspaper on a park bench: “I tried being my own boss for a while, and you wouldn’t believe the absenteeism!” (As I say, “When you work for someone else, everybody is your boss; when you work for yourself, everybody is your critic!” And that is also no joke!)

—Frank and Ernest cartoon, Tulsa World, nd

“It’s the holiday season. I just love this time of year. It makes me feel greedy all over.” (I used to love it, but now I hate it—because so many in our society seem to share Garfield’s feelings. Yet I am not nearly as concerned about the commercialization of Christmas as I am about the commercialization of Christianity! See my later post of quotes about religion and politics.)

—Garfield cartoon, Tulsa World, 12-09-ny

Thanksgiving and My Birthday

Prayers for Thanksgiving Day and My Birthday 

Almighty and gracious Father, we give thee thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make us, we beseech thee, faithful stewards of thy great bounty, for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
—Prayer for Thanksgiving Day,
Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, 1979 Version, p. 194

“O God, our times are in your hand: Look with favor, we pray, on your servant [Jimmy], as he begins another year. Grant that [we all] may grow in wisdom and grace, and strengthen [our] trust in your goodness all the days of [our] life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
—Prayer for a Birthday, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,
1979 version, p. 830

As indicated by the title of this post and the opening prayers above, this blog entry is in recognition of two annual events that usually occur either on or near the same day of the year: Thanksgiving Day and my birthday.

This year Thanksgiving falls on November 22 and my seventy-fourth birthday falls the next day on November 23. (See my earlier posts on the seventy-fourth birthday of my cousin Donald Peacock on October 12 and the post on the birthdays of my late brothers Adrian and Joe on October 20.)

When I was born on November 23 in 1938, my birth occurred on Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving Day on Thursday. I often quip that “I was born on the night before Thanksgiving, so that year Thanksgiving was canceled!” That, of course, is not true, only a bit of humorous “poetic nonsense.”

In the same vein, I also say of my devoutly religious mother, the daughter of a country Southern Baptist preacher, “I was born on Wednesday night, and I’m sure Mama took me to church the next Sunday morning!” That is probably not an exaggeration.

Finally, I also say that since we Baptists in rural Selma, Arkansas, did not have a church building of our own at the time, we alternated Sunday services with the Methodists in their building which was located right across the “branch” from my farmhouse birthplace. So I also say that although I was taken to church on the first Sunday morning after my Wednesday night birth, I don’t know who was in charge of that service—the Baptists or the Methodists. (I also say that I am sure that, as far as God is concerned, it really doesn’t matter.)

I have featured all those quotes and several photos of the historic Selma Methodist Church and my birthplace several times in earlier posts on this blog. I have also featured several photos of the Selma Baptist Church, which was constructed later when I was about nine years old and among whose founders were my mother and her father, Rev. Willis Barrett, pastor of that church.

Thus, as I have explained in several earlier posts about my spiritual background, although my Peacock ancestors were Middle Georgia Methodist minister-planters who immigrated to Southeast Arkansas just before the Civil War looking for new fields to sow (in cotton) and reap (in souls), my immediate Selma family were Southern “Baptists of the Baptists.”

As such, I not only attended Baptist churches, graduated from Ouachita Baptist College, and taught in Baptist junior colleges, in 1986 Mari (who was also a staunch Southern Baptist) and I were led to join the Episcopal Church; specifically, Trinity Episcopal Church in Tulsa. (The reasons for this change of denomination and church affiliation were explained in an earlier post titled “A Summary of My Personal Spirituality and Pilgrimage,” which also explained the reasons for our eventual return to the Methodist Church of my ancestors.)

During the almost twenty years that Mari and I were active members of the Episcopal Church we were drawn to and impressed by the beauty, formality, dignity, and solemnity of the Episcopal liturgy and prayers.

As examples, besides the opening prayers above, in this Thanksgiving post I would like to share two daily prayers that appear in the opening and closing pages of each issue of Forward Day by Day, the Episcopal daily devotional booklet. These prayers are quoted here by permission of the publisher in hopes that they may speak to and be of service to other Christians (like us “Baptiscopalian Methodists”) who may find them as beautiful, moving, and meaningful as we do, especially on this day of national thanksgiving.

A Morning Resolve

I will try this day to live a simple, sincere, and serene life, repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence, exercising economy in expenditure, generosity in giving, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike faith in God.

     In particular I will try to be faithful in those habits of prayer, work, study, physical exercise, eating, and sleep which I believe the Holy Spirit has shown me to be right.

     And as I cannot in my own strength do this, nor even with a hope of success attempt it, I look to thee, O Lord God my Father, in Jesus my Savior, and ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

For Today

O God:

Give me strength to live another day;

Let me not turn coward before its difficulties
or prove recreant to its duties;

Let me not lose faith in other people;

Keep me sweet and sound of heart, in spite of
ingratitude, treachery, or meanness;

Preserve me from minding little stings or giving them;

Help me to keep my heart clean, and to live so
honestly and fearlessly that no outward
failure can dishearten me or take away the
joy of conscious integrity;

Open wide the eyes of my soul that I may see
good in all things;

Grant me this day some new vision of thy truth;

Inspire me with the spirit of joy and gladness;
and make me the cup of strength to suffering
souls; in the name of the strong Deliverer, our
only Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Copyright Forward Movement. All rights reserved.

Southern Gospel Addendum

“Consider the lilies of the field . . . .”

—Matthew 6:28 KJV

As noted in a previous post, some of the quotations and other copy in my blog were part of a Sunday school class I once taught at Trinity Episcopal Church titled “The Spirituality of Home.” Each of the Sunday school sessions was opened with a piece of music that related to the theme of that day’s class discussion. One of those musical introductions was Willie Nelson’s version of the classic Gospel song “An Uncloudy Day.”

Coincidentally, in the September 30 post of his blog “Weekly Grist for the Eyes and Mind,” my Ouachita Baptist College classmate and longtime friend, and the designer of this blog, Joe Dempsey, featured some close-up photos of lovely “lilies of the field” growing in his neighborhood.

As part of that post he also featured two musical pieces: folksinger Burl Ives singing “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” and country singer Willie Nelson singing “An Uncloudy Day.” To visit this site and to listen to these classic Gospel songs that were so much a part of our Southern evangelical upbringing, click here and then click on the video link illustrated with church buildings. I hope these words, images, and songs will “strum some chords (and heartstrings)” of your own spiritual heritage.

For an interesting contrast between white and black Gospel versions of “An Uncloudy Day,” click here to hear that same song by The Staple Singers, which was recorded in 1956, the year I graduated from high school and entered Ouachita.

“Return to the Arkansas Delta:” A Review

“Return to the Arkansas Delta”

Article written by Charles Bowden
with photographs and captions by Eugene Richards
National Geographic, November 2012, pp. 124-139

“The delta west of the Mississippi River was once a place where sharecroppers lived in segregation and poverty yet forged a vibrant community. Industrial farming has erased their culture, leaving behind endless sky and few people. Eugene Richards documented their world four decades ago. Now he returns to where his pictures began.”
—Introduction to “Return to the Arkansas Delta”
by Charles Bowden

As indicated by the title and the opening quotation above, this post is a sort of a review of an article on the Arkansas Delta that appeared in the November 2012 issue of National Geographic.

I learned about this article through a phone call from my friend Ed Roling, the Christian Education Director at Trinity Episcopal Church in Tulsa where Mari and I were members for twenty years back in the past. Through the years Ed and I have remained close friends though he is from Iowa and I am from Arkansas, specifically the Arkansas Delta.

Ed called to tell me about the article on the Arkansas Delta because I have talked and written on my blog about the Delta so much over the years that he has become intrigued by that faraway and almost foreign land that Mari and I love so much even though we have been “exiled” from it for thirty-five years.

On the phone Ed was excited to have discovered the article with its numerous photos and captions from the present and from forty years ago. Together the copy and the photos and captions recall the return of Eugene Richards, a New England Yankee, who left his native Boston to work in the Arkansas Delta during the civil rights era of the 1960s and ’70s.

In fact, Ed was so excited about the article that he offered to bring it to us in Sapulpa, about a thirty-minute drive from his home in West Tulsa. Since our church, the First United Methodist of Sapulpa, was having its annual fish fry that evening, we agreed to meet Ed at the church at six o’clock. After standing in line for an hour to get our fried catfish and potatoes, cole slaw, cornbread, beans, and iced tea, we sat and ate together. Afterward we returned to our house where we continued to talk about the article and the Arkansas Delta—a subject about which none of us ever seems to tire.

That shared interest in our disappearing homeland is one reason that I have already asked Ed (a former Roman Catholic priest) to preach my funeral in Sapulpa and, if possible, to accompany Mari and my family “down home” to the Delta to preside over my burial in “consecrated soil.”

Meanwhile before that final return to the land of my ancestors, Ed is eager for us to make one more “sentimental journey” together to the Delta so Mari and I can serve as personal guides in his introductory tour of the “Holy Land,” though we tell him the Delta he will see is not the same Delta we grew up with in the 1940s to ’60s or even the same Delta we were forced to leave in 1977.

Mari and I feel flattered by Ed’s request to serve as his guides to the Delta.  Despite the intervening years, we still feel somewhat competent to do so since at one time or another in our past we lived in each of the three sections of the Arkansas Delta, what I term: (1) the Lower Delta (that section below the Arkansas River and above the Louisiana line, the lower boundary of the Arkansas Delta); (2) the Middle Delta (the section immediately above the Arkansas River up to Interstate 40 that runs from Little Rock to Memphis, the western and eastern limits of the Arkansas Delta); and (3) the Upper Delta (that section from Interstate 40 northward to the Missouri line, the northern boundary of the Arkansas Delta). Each of these sections is somewhat different from the other two as we learned while growing up in our hometown of McGehee in the Lower Delta, beginning our married life teaching high school and elementary school in Holly Grove in the Middle Delta, and finally teaching at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro in the Upper Delta in our young adulthood.

The one disappointment we experienced in reading and discussing the National Geographic article with Ed was that the only map of the Arkansas Delta in the article is basically of the Middle Delta, which does not show or label any of the towns and cities in the Lower Delta (such as Pine Bluff, Dumas, McGehee, Arkansas City, Dermott, Lake Village, Eudora, etc. that we knew so well) or the northernmost parts of the Upper Delta (like Blytheville, Walnut Ridge, Trumann, and particularly Jonesboro where Southern writer John Grisham was born and the locale of Grisham’s popular novel and movie titled A Painted House).

However, the article and map do show and label the major rivers (the St. Francis, the White, the Arkansas, the Mississippi) and many of the towns and cities in and near the Middle Delta (Augusta, Cotton Plant, Marvell, Marianna, Elaine, Helena-West Helena, etc.) with interesting observations about them and what transpired in them in the past and the changes in them in the present. The dozen or more photos and captions (old and new) and the copy also describe what Richards and his fellow civil rights workers encountered and experienced in their first visit in the 1960s and ’70s contrasted with what he encountered and experienced in his recent return visit.

Naturally, after reading the article that Ed brought us, I wanted to share it with those on my blog list and began to wonder how I could do so. Although I had planned to publish a follow-up to last week’s post about humorous self-quotes with a post about humorous quotes from others, I began to see that the best way to share the theme of the article with all those on my blog list was to make up a new post, a sort of review of the article, in hopes that it will pique the interest of those who have not yet heard of it or read it.

As such, I have lifted out some of the more descriptive quotations from that article to share with you. I hope this peek into the world that Mari and I knew so well from our youth and young adulthood will strike a similar cord with you whether you have ever lived or even visited this fascinating land that we still call home.

I do so by offering some of the more insightful quotations from that article that reflect the message about our beloved but blighted and benighted homeland and what has happened to it over the years of our fifty-year marriage and particularly our thirty-five year “Oklahomian Exile.” Much of what is expressed in these select quotations expresses the underlying theme of my entire blog: what has happened to the Arkansas Delta in our prolonged involuntary absence so that now, as much as we love it and miss it, we “can’t go home again.”

I sincerely hope these quotations will inspire you to purchase that issue of the National Geographic and read the entire article and view the photos and captions for yourself. Perhaps it will speak to you as it did to us. And perhaps if you too are from the Arkansas Delta you will do as we did and purchase extra copies to pass down to our children and grandchildren so they will know something of where we are from and thus who we are.

Note that the italics in the select quotations were added by me for emphasis. My comments are set in brackets.

Select Quotes from “Return to the Arkansas Delta”

“Beyond the plowed ground are the remains of a sharecropper’s shack that has been made irrelevant by the mechanical revolution of the past 70 years.” [See later quote on the disappearance of sharecropper shacks from the Delta.]

“The photographer is a white man who had come from Boston to the small town of Augusta during the civil rights era of the late sixties, and he now believes it was the most important time of his life.” [So do I!]

“Memory comes and goes here in the delta, mainly goes.” [I disagree. In the Arkansas Delta as in the South as a whole, memory, like the fertile Mississippi River silt on which it rests, runs deep and lasts forever! See the following quotes.]

“The place still beckons, captures the heart, and persists like the blues songs that grew out of the pain and the rough-edged Saturday nights.”

“The delta is the soul of the South, a place . . . always . . . shrowded in its past . . . “

“Now it is a vast agricultural machine that has swept clean the land, [a land] that seems to hardly need people or towns.” [I used to say that the Delta was a huge rural ghetto that needed to be "urban-renewalized" with a bulldozer! Now that is precisely what is happening, and I am filled with regret and remorse because there is nothing anyone can do to stop it or reverse it!]

“[But] the lands remains, the place of the great river and the phantom chords of American memory.” [See the earlier quote on memory and the Delta.]

“[In the Delta] the past can be forgotten but not erased.” [So true!]

“By 1970 the sharecropping world was already disappearing, and the landscape of today—huge fields, giant machines, battered towns, few people—beginning to emerge.”  [After being away from the Delta for years, Mari and I were living in our hometown of McGehee in the mid-70s and saw already the changing Delta and the disappearance of its former way of life.]

“But for Richards . . . his time in Arkansas is still the burning core of his life. . . . [And of my life!] Now, 40 years later, the sharecropper life that he documented has slipped away.” [And so have I, and so has my beloved homeland!]

“There used to be hundreds of them [sharecropper shacks], painted white and raised up on concrete blocks. Now there’s not so much as a floorboard or a nail to mark where they were. It’s as if the Mississippi had overflowed and swept them all away.” [I know the feeling! During my thirty-five years of “Oklahomian Exile” on each of my “semi-annual pilgrimages to the Holy Land,” I watched as my beloved and sorely missed homeland washed away and disappeared!]

“It’s hard to document the disappearance of a way of life, to capture the delta that once was and isn’t today. . . . [which is what I am trying to do in my blog!] “

“Whatever the South is, it stays with you, and whatever the delta is, it beats as the heart inside the South.” [This final quote is reminiscent of a similar one from Southern writer Pat Conroy in his book Beach Music: “Mark my words. You’ll be back soon. The South’s got a lot of wrong with it. But it’s permanent press and it doesn’t wear out.” Neither does the Arkansas Delta! It stays with me and within me night and day! As I say, “Muddy Mississippi River water leaves a stain on the soul that is virtually impossible to get out—assuming any fool would try!”]

Note:  Additional information, remembrances, and quotes about the Arkansas Delta can be viewed by visiting the following posts on my blog:

“My Bucket List Trip II: The Arkansas Delta”
“Yo Recuerdo (I Remember)”
“Bayou Bartholomew: Two Book Reviews”
“A Gathering at the River”
“Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton: Part I”
“Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton: Part II”
“Additional Quotes about the Delta”
“Days Gone By “ (A trip through the Arkansas Delta in the year 2000)
“Born in the Delta” (A review of a book by a Delta author from our county)
“During Wind and Rain” (A review of another Delta book by the same author)

Who’s to Blame?: Humorous Self-quotes

“But whose fault is it? I need somebody to blame!”
—David Letterman on recent Late Show

“I am not a stand-up comedian; I’m more of a sit-down humorist.”
—Jimmy Peacock

In this post I would like to share some humorous items drawn from my own writings and sayings collected over the years.

First is a poem I wrote years ago as a means of expressing my displeasure and frustration at the practice of blaming others, which seems to have become the prevailing pastime in our society—especially in politics.

I know it is not great poetry, but as I say in one of my endless self-quotes, “I’m not a poet; I’m just a guy who, in order to express himself, sometimes ‘takes a turn for the verse.’”

Afterward I will share some select humorous self-quotes, and in my next post I will share some humorous quotes from others.

Who’s to Blame?

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
—Pogo Possum

We can blame it on the whites,
We can blame it on the blacks,
We can blame it on those folks
who live across the tracks.

We can blame it on the red,
Or blame it on the yellow,
We can always lay the blame
on some other fellow.

We can blame it on the right,
We can blame it on the left,
We can blame it on the devil
or on some evil elf.

But the truth of the matter,
If it’s examined clearer:
The one who’s most to blame is—
that guy in the mirror!

—Jimmy Peacock April 24, 1996

(Based on Isaiah 53:6, Matthew 7:1-5, Luke 14:11; Luke 18:9-14, Romans 3:23, 1 Tim. 1:15; James 5:16, 1 John 1:8-10, etc.)

Humorous Self-Quotes

“I am convinced that in the battle against sin and evil, humor is every bit as important as faith and truth.”
—Jimmy Peacock

Following are some select humorous self-quotes, which I have set flush left and in regular type with my comments in parentheses and emphasis in italics.

If many of these self-quotes seem negative and self-depreciating, remember that writing is the way I deal with the failures of my life (and they are legion) and my feelings about them and about myself, whom I know to be “the one to blame.”

“Oh, I’m a changed man.” (My reply to surgeon’s post-triple-bypass question, “How are you?” but which turned out to be totally untrue.)

“I hope nothin’ ever happens to affect my brain ’cause I haven’t had a mind for years—and I ain’t never had no sense!”

“Because of my frequent failure in romance in my younger days, I say that I am like that French painter who had the same problem. Like him I too was ‘born Toulouse.’” (It’s a pun! If you don’t know who Toulouse-Lautrec was, click here.)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

“The reason I am such a nervous wreck is because for the past thirty-five years I have been operating on a shoestring while hanging by a thread!” (At seventy-four years of age I don’t know which bothers me most—what I have to live with or what I have to live without!)

“About the only regular exercise I get is an endless exercise in futility!” (I say that the title of my life’s course (race) should be The Peacock Futility.)

“If you have been told a piece of gossip by someone who claims he/she got it ‘straight from the horse’s mouth,’ you can be sure that you have heard from both ends of the horse!”

“You might be a redneck if . . . your favorite piece of art work was carved with a chainsaw.”

“PEACOCK’S LAW: The odds are ten to one that a fifty-fifty chance will go against you a hundred percent of the time!” (Mari and I still draw monthly checks, but the problem is that “de-ducks” always eat up “de Peacocks!”)

“The traditional question of the old country comedians was: Which is better, a good ole big ’un or a big ole good ’un’? My stock answer was always: It depends on whether you prefer quantity or amount.” (Also see my next parenthetical comment.)

“The most effective form of male enhancement is a close encounter with female enhancement.” (As I told Dolly Parton at the church picnic: “I see you have an ice chest.” If you don’t get it, it’s a pun!)

“Someone has said that all comedy is a plea for love. If that is true, then I am funnier than Cyrano de Bergerac.” (If you don’t know who Cyrano de Bergerac was, click here.)

Cyrano de Bergerac

“Most of us spend the first half of our life living it up and the second half trying to live it down!” (I certainly have!)

“I’m so old I can remember when Wonder Bread built strong bodies only three ways.”

“One reason I can’t stand to look at mirrors or photos of myself is not only because of how old I look now, but also because I know this is the youngest I will ever look again!”

“Due to our financial situation I have had to give up all hope of retiring, but as the son of a cattleman I must admit that I do still harbor the fantasy of being put out to stud.” (And given my age and condition, that is, indeed, a fantasy!)

“Mari had surgery on her feet; I need to have surgery on my head.” (It seems the only way to get to the bottom of me is by lobotomy.)

“God may or may not be on my side, but He is sure as heck on my case.” (If you want to set me straight, you will have to take a number and wait—God’s not through yet!)

“If I am ever exalted as long as I have been abased, I’m gonna be walkin’ in high cotton.” (What’s time to a hawg [Razorback] or a God?)

“One of my problems is that I have an encyclopedic mind (thought process) in a sound-bite mentality (society).” (Another problem is that I am a lazy perfectionist. See my later post titled “About Copyeditors.”)

“I’m not a genius or even an intellectual, I’m just a guy who’s smart enough to figure out when he’s being played for a fool—a role that I play very well. After all, I’m a natural!” (They say that every dog has his day; mine is All Fool’s [April Fool] Day.)

“I know what, I just don’t know how—my only hope of success is drastically lowered expectations.”

“One thing about being a total failure is that you never have to worry about becoming a ‘has-been.’” (One time when I was in the hospital Mari’s elementary school pupils sent me get-well messages, one of which was addressed to “Mrs. Peacock’s has-been.” “Out of the mouths of babes and children . . .” Actually, based on this quotation that message was a compliment.)

“It’s funny that (supposedly) everybody loves Jimmy—but everybody wants to change Jimmy.” (To paraphrase what a preacher once said, if somebody says he loves you with the love of the Lord, you can be sure he means that he loves you too much to leave you alone.)

“I am amazed at people’s capacity to correct me about something that they know absolutely nothing about except what I just told them.”(You start out telling people your business, and they will end up telling you your business! And it won’t take very long!)

“Although I don’t have a seminary degree, I have spent the past thirty-five years working on my MDD—My Daily Dread.” (The problem now is that my daily dread has dried up and died. As I say, the only thing worse than having to do it is not having it to do.)

“Judging by my life’s experiences, even God has no solution for terminal stupidity.” (I was pulling into a parking lot at a medical clinic recently praying that the specialist would find a cure for my problems, when I noticed the license plate on the car in front of me which read: “There is no cure for stupid!” I laughed out loud.)

“I have had my fifteen minutes of fame. It’s just that it was spread out over the past seventy-four years—which comes out to less than fifteen seconds of fame per year.”

“I have two ways of knowing that catastrophe is about to befall me—when things are going wrong and when they are going right.”

“From bitter experience, I have learned never to congratulate myself—and to take it with a huge block of (cattle) salt when anyone else congratulates me.”

“The most dangerous weapon in the world is not the Saturday night special, it’s the everyday silverware.” (We’re forkin’ ourselves to death.)

“It’s easy to spot a Peacock whenever you’re in a crowd; he’s showing his tail with one end, and with the other crying fowl.” (The trouble with the Peacock is that he has driven himself as crazy as a goose trying to get his ducks in a row and has ended up having to eat crow. I also say that a Peacock is just a turkey with an attitude.)

“In my lifetime I have gone from Tex Ritter to Text-Twitter. Of the two I prefer the former!” (William Faulkner said, “Life is motion,” but I like roots – which don’t move! If you don’t know who Tex Ritter was, click here!)

Tex Ritter

“I don’t have any trouble with chores like car and yard and clothes. I have a ‘couple of hands’ to do all that.” (I am Mari’s house boy, yard boy, car boy, clothes boy, and toy boy. But I must admit that in this case the last is least!)

“Among many others, there are two things that absolutely run and ruin my life: the clock and the calendar.” (As a result I do everything I do two ways: fast and half-fast.)

“My head’s too white to have a choice!”—Answer I gave in a dream. (As an obsessive-compulsive, if my eye falls, my gut crawls, my nerves bawl, and my behind hauls! Oops, just saw something that needs to be done . . . bye, y’all, gotta go!)

Update on Personal Idol Worship

Here is a copy of the larger-than-life size photo of Elizabeth Taylor that appears on the wall calendar for my birth month of November. For more about my obsession with the lovely Liz see my earlier post titled “My Lifelong Attraction to Black Beauty.” This photo is taken from a 2012 calendar published by Calendar Ink 866-611-2248, Austin, TX 78744, www.calendars.com and may be purchased from them. The photo itself is from The Passion for Men photography session February 10, 1989, Culver City, California © 2011 Gary Bernstein, http://www.garybernsteinstudio.com/.

The Return of the Trumpet: A Ouachita Memory

 “If it wasn’t for retrospect and introspect
I ‘spect I wouldn’t have any ‘spect at all!”
—Jimmy Peacock

Dedication

This post, a story about a bit of nostalgic nonsense that took place during our freshman year at Ouachita (WASH-a-taw) Baptist College in 1956-57, is dedicated to the memory of our late and lovely classmate Sara Lynn O’Cain. For more about Sara and her part in this story, read the following memoir by Hunter Douglas and my editorial notes at the end of it.

Ouachita Memories

In this Halloween post I continue a subject that I began in earlier posts: memories associated with our alma mater, Ouachita Baptist College (now University), and some OBC students and graduates who were a part of our shared lives.

Ouachita Baptist College (now University) as it looked in 2011 with the Ouachita River in the upper left corner; our freshman men’s residence in 1956, O. C. Bailey Hall, is the small right-angled dorm closest to the river (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

I referred to this subject in earlier posts about Mari and me such as “Facts about Marion Williams Peacock,” “The Peacock Love Story/The Passing of a Friend,” and “Our Honeymoon Was No Honeymoon for Mari.”

Ouachita, its former president, and some of our fellow Ouachitonians are also the subjects of three other posts.

One, titled “Occupation in Exile, Deliverance in Time,” began with an anecdote told about Dr. Daniel Grant, a former president of Ouachita, who granted me permission to quote it in that January 2012 essay about my ongoing “Oklahomian Exile.”

A second, which appeared at Christmas time, was titled “The Three Unwise Men: An Arkansas Christmas Memory.” It involved my OBC buddies Charles Wright and Cullen Gannaway and me on a “pessimistic pilgrimage” to Hot Springs on Christmas Eve in 1960.

A recent post titled “Country Come to Town/A Youthful Trip to Dallas” also featured me and Charles Wright and part of Mari’s Clique and our 1958 trip to Dallas to attend the wedding of our mutual McGehee/Ouachita friend Jarrell Rial.

But this Ouachita post is a bit different from the others in two ways:

First, it takes place in 1956-57 and involves several members of our freshman class and one of the most outlandish pranks we pulled during that memorable first year at OBC; and

Second, it is written not by me but by Hunter Douglas, one of my closest buddies in that freshman class and one of the other leaders in that nefarious enterprise. I asked him to write his version of that story because he seems to recall the details of it much better than I do.

Hunter Douglas as he looked in our 1956-57 OBC yearbook with part of his handwritten note to me (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

So now here is Hunter Douglas’s memory of the now famous and infamous saga of “The Return of the Trumpet” just as he wrote it. I have edited it only slightly by shortening some paragraphs to fit the blog format. I have inserted some poor quality photos scanned from our 1956-57 Ouachita yearbook with permission of Ouachita and the “usual suspects” involved. There are some explanatory notes at the end of the post.

The Return of the Trumpet
By Hunter R. Douglas

Also known as “Guess What, Brown!”; “Sidney Brown Saves O. C. Bailey”; and more privately by the author as “Hippo Bill’s Revenge,” this is a story concerning times at Ouachita Baptist College during the freshman days of the Class of 1960.

In 2010 the Ouachita Fiftieth Reunion questionnaire asked us members of the Class of 1960 to share our favorite OBC stories. Jimmy Dale Peacock told me that his favorite story was about The Trumpet, but that he would rather another of us take the responsibility (blame) for the writing.

Mari and me at the Ouachita Class of 1960 fifty-year reunion held in April of 2010 (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

Me as I looked in the 1956-57 OBC yearbook with part of a note I signed to myself reading “Oh, you are darlin’!” with an arrow pointing to the curl of hair on my forehead a la Elvis Presley (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

Joseph P. Dempsey was thereafter consulted, and after being interrupted several times by convulsions into laughter, we were agreed that it should be written, secrecy not being an issue at this time—the statute of limitations, etc.

Joseph P. Dempsey, known to us as Joe, as he looked in our 1956-57 OBC yearbook with part of his handwritten note to me (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

There have been those who would question the truth of some of these stories being told. The reputation of the institution being what it is, we students were expected to develop high standards of performance in life, and not waste valuable time, especially on skullduggery. Truth is always better than fiction, however, and this is the truth of it, as best we can recall it at this time.

In our freshman year, O. C. Bailey was the new dormitory for men. Some in our class were among the first occupants, and right in the beginning we formed a men’s fellowship dedicated to keeping boredom away from our doors by the means of smiling faces. There have been claims that we were the inspiration for the original smiley face logo. This is the same logo Bob Riley used with the patch over one eye, but that is another story.

O.C. Bailey Hall as it looked in 1956-57 when it was first built and some of our class were among the first students to occupy it (to magnify, click on the photo from the OBC 1956-57 yearbook, used by permission of Ouachita)

The dorm custodian, since the place was brand new, was expected to keep things looking very good. Our custodian was first known as “Mr. Miller,” because the dorm mom always called him that. We guessed he was sixty years of age at the time since he was so cranky. But he did try extra hard to please. Maybe too hard. We took notice of that.

Mr. Miller actually was harmless enough. No one had any reason to be afraid of him, even though he had a volatile temper, instantly available. He was quite a singer of hymns. Each day during classes as he ran the floor buffing machine in the halls, he would sing. Since this was before the advent of today’s praise music, there was never any question that it was both dignified and reverent, though homely.

We would hear the hum of the machine being accompanied by his singing of some beloved old hymn. Then the confounded contraption would malfunction. The buffer would go silent, and the words of the hymn would remain suspended in midair, interrupted by angry and loud curses, punctuated by something that sounded like a man kicking the stuffings out of a buffer. We figured that Mr. Miller had not recovered his religion from some previous traumatic experience. Since some of us came from the Delta, we knew about cotton farming, and we thought with some sympathy that maybe he had worked with mules.

When the machine decided to work again, Mr. Miller would resume his songs of praise, and go on buffing the floor as if nothing had happened. But, something had happened. We had taken notice of it.

We were still new freshmen when I got into a more personal situation with the good man. I was what some call a “Beagle Man.” I was raising beagles before I came to Ouachita, and I still have my beagles fifty-four years later. If this entitled me to some consideration, Mr. Miller did not give me any. We all knew that we weren’t supposed to keep a beagle in O. C. Bailey. I kept old Bill outside. That was not exactly like trying to keep him in the room, and I said so. And that is not exactly what started the trouble either.

What happened was that Mr. Miller saw my dog, and fearing the necessity of having to sweep the lawn for “land mines,” went after Bill with a broom. Now this dog was not just any mutt. His registration papers showed that his official name was “Carry Line Buddy’s Hippo Bill.” This was beagle royalty, the world championship bloodlines. I held him in great esteem. Also, it was not Bill’s fault that he was lame in one back leg and had to run on only three legs, and thus could not quite escape Mr. Miller’s wrath. Hippo Bill was sent home, but not forgotten. I had taken notice of it.

Mr. Miller was making a name for himself. It was noticed that he was not smiling. There was discussion in the dorm of how to teach the poor man how to smile like us. We sought a means to redeem him from his habitual curses, excesses of temper, and general unpleasantness. We were college boys now, Ouachitonians even. If anybody could teach him, we college boys could.

Since his ill temper and low self-esteem had brought dishonor upon the Miller name, we began to call him something else. I am not sure as of this writing just exactly how we came to a consensus about what to call him. In order that he might redeem his good name and take pride in it, we began to call him “Sidney Brown.” Of course, since it was not his real name, we got a real smile out of that. Predictably, he did not. Concerning the name “Brown,” it has been alleged that there took place some idle and irresponsible talk concerning his likely reaction if a certain container of brown paint got turned over above the stairwell and by an uncanny coincidence fell into the hair of his head. Anyway, that never happened exactly that way.

What happened was that he showed his temper again, even though the Brown name is an honorable name. He thus ignored and rejected a clear warning that bad luck might come upon him if he did not smile more. He just got grumpier. He even dared to speak to us by other than our real names. This information is given in order to clear up the confusion as to the identity of Sidney Brown. The reader will take note of him.

The Trumpet is to be identified with the band float in the 1956 homecoming parade. The homecoming season was a time when things happened. There would be marching units from the military and the band, and display of the floats with their queens. The floats had been constructed by the student organizations that were competing for the prize as best float. The band float, which was fervently and sincerely created, featured a large purple and gold trumpet, Ouachita’s school colors, following a musical theme. Now a trumpet made out of chicken wire and crepe paper might not have turned out to be the biggest nor most spectacular float, but the theme was most appropriate, and we band members had Sara O’Cain.

Sara O’Cain as she appeared in our 1956-57 OBC yearbook (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

Sara O’Cain from Pine Bluff was the band queen. Sara proudly represented the band and made up for whatever plain appearance the trumpet itself may have had. This is the same Sara O’Cain who cast the spell over my O. C. Bailey roommate, John McCown. We are reminded of Al Capp’s Dogpatch cartoon character, “Stupefyin’ Jones.” I was present when it happened, and I can tell you that all John did was look at Sara one time, which instantly stunned him of his normal senses. The rest of us fellows do not think he ever totally recovered again either. I never witnessed such a thing before, nor have I since.

John McCown as he appeared in our 1956-57 OBC yearbook (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

John and I were friends as far back as the third grade, and my father had baptized both of us in the same baptistery at Dumas, just south of Pine Bluff. I thought I knew him. After this event, John left our fellowship without a sensible reason and formed the “Friends of Sara O’Cain Fellowship,” with John and Sara as the only members. They kept all their smiles to themselves, and the only way one could get into their group was to be born into it. By the time we graduated, there were only two new members, and they were not even students. In fact, they were mere infants.

I have wondered if something about the trumpet had anything to do with any of this, but John does not know. John does remember that Sara rode on the band float. He does not recall ever knowing about the return of the trumpet. There is some question that he remembers the trumpet at all. No wonder.

An OBU Homecoming float similar to the one on which Sara O’Cain rode–note the 1950s car pulling the float (to magnify, click on the photo used by permission of Ouachita)

The trumpet was created by those in the band who, though few in number, worked hard together as a team so the band float could take its proper place, with Sara riding in her proper place. It was a good time, and it came to an end all too soon. The guys making the smiles, having agreed it was too soon, extended the festivities after their fashion. John McCown, being occupied elsewhere, missed out on the fun, and is therefore innocent of any of the following.

When the parade was over, there was this trailer which had to be returned to its owner. There remained this purple and gold orphan, a large stuffed wire trumpet contraption which had no known home. For those who believe in predestination, take note that the trumpet fell into good hands. It was duly discussed in O. C. Bailey by the interested parties. A Friends of the Trumpet Society was (informally) organized. The trumpet would not disappear into oblivion and be trashed, like the other floats. It bore the school colors, and represented the band as well. A decision was unanimously made that the proper place to both house and honor the trumpet was in one of the toilet stalls (locked from the inside, of course) in the third-floor bathroom in O. C. Bailey, near the showers.

The next day during classes the trumpet was present on the third floor at the time Sidney Brown normally came to clean up the bathroom. Many times history is made outside the public view. It appears that there were no unbiased witnesses present when the trumpet was found locked in that stall. We lament that there is no historical record of any kind that we know about which would tell us exactly what happened.

Today, the English department from some great university would surely pay a high price for a recording of the language for its students to study. A reality show would pay a fortune for a video. No recordings are known to exist. What is known to us is that when classes were over, the trumpet was not present in its place in the locked stall in the bathroom on the third floor of O. C. Bailey Hall. An investigation was made, and it was found that the trumpet had been unceremoniously dragged out in back of O. C. Bailey and thrown on the trash pile, with no regard for preserving its purple and gold colors. The Friends of the Trumpet took notice.

The next day during classes, the trumpet, which had been carefully restored to the locked stall in the bathroom on the third floor during the night, disappeared again. The trumpet was found this time not merely in rear of O. C. Bailey, but off the bluff, far down in the ravine entangled among the vines above the waters of the Ouachita River. It was not even considered safe to go down there. Brown seemed to be losing his temper again. The interested parties took notice.

The next day during classes, the trumpet having been restored to its proper place, a sign appeared on the stall door in honor of General Douglas MacArthur, which read, “‘I Have Returned.’ Signed, The Trumpet.” A grumpy sixty-year-old man who takes on a group of eighteen-year-olds is probably doomed to failure, but Brown was in no mood to take warning. He was not amused. There was no smile on his face, even though he was surrounded by a host of people who were smiling. Like the archangel Michael when disputing with the devil concerning the body of Moses, he dared not bring a slanderous accusation. (See Jude 1:9) Instead, he focused his wrath upon the hapless trumpet, which after that time could no longer be found anywhere on campus. An extensive investigation determined that the trumpet had been placed in residence at the Arkadelphia city dump. An appropriate committee was appointed. Notice was taken of it.

The next day during classes, the trumpet was again residing in the locked stall in the bathroom on the third floor of O. C. Bailey Hall, and another sign had appeared on the stall door which read, “Guess What, Brown!” The trumpet had changed a little this time, since garbage and refuse from the dump had become enmeshed in the chicken-wire frame. It was noticed that though the school colors were more subdued, the trumpet had maintained its glory. This time, you could know it was in there without even going inside the bathroom, since there was an unmistakable odor all over the third floor. Once again the opportunity to record the language was lost.

The trumpet disappeared again. Not only was it nowhere on campus, it was not to be seen at the dump either. A very intensive and time-consuming investigation by the committee finally revealed that the trumpet had this time suffered a regrettable and undignified fate. It had been taken back to the city dump, placed on a pile of combustible rubbish, and set afire. The charred remains had then been unceremoniously buried under a stinking pile of burnt rubbish and garbage by means of the city bulldozer. The only remaining visible evidence of its existence was a strand of burnt chicken wire barely showing from under the pyre, and this came to the attention of the committee.

Gone was the purple and gold. The bulldozer and the fire had reduced the trumpet to a twisted, charred, stinking wad of junk wire. Brown just ought not to have done that. We are reminded that a man’s sins will find him out. Notice was taken of it.

The next day during classes, the trumpet, now stripped of our school colors, in a most deplorable condition, ashes, garbage, stench and all, was found crumpled and piled onto the floor of that locked stall. That whole wing of O. C. Bailey reeked with the stench. A sign was present, which reminded Sidney Brown of his misdeeds. The sign read, “‘I have returned. You will never get rid of me. I will haunt you forever.’ Signed, The Trumpet.”

The next day during classes, word circulated that the trumpet was gone again. It had disappeared surely enough this time. No amount of investigation turned up even a clue. Homecoming had finally come to an end, and so the Friends of the Trumpet dissolved the committee and went on to the next smile.

It so happened later that I found myself out behind O. C. Bailey enjoying the view of the river, and having a friendly conversation with Sidney Brown. He was smiling now, and the subject of the whereabouts of the trumpet came up. Rather than throw a fit, he burst out laughing. In fact, it seemed to me more like cackling, if not choking.

“You’ll never see that @#$% @#*& *%$ again!” Sidney Brown exclaimed. “It’s half-way down to Noo-Aw-LEENS by now. I threw it off the Ouachita River bridge this time! Haw, Haw, Haw!”

Sidney Brown was laughing. We were laughing. Everybody was laughing. We never did know who got the last laugh.

Only The Trumpet knows. . .

Editorial Notes:

Ouachita Baptist College (now University) has been featured in earlier posts. It is located in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, an antebellum port city on the Ouachita River in the southwest part of the state. To learn more about Arkadelphia, click here.

Joseph P. Dempsey was of course my Ouachita buddy Joe Dempsey who, fifty-four years after the events in this story, designed this blog and its art work and helped me to launch it and continues to help me maintain it.

In regard to O. C. Bailey Hall, Hunter Douglas sent the following information in an email:  “I did not mention in the story that my mother was on the OBU Board of Trustees when O. C. Bailey was built, and that she took pride that her son was among the first occupants. Her name was on the cornerstone plaque in the lobby. I regret very much that she did not ever get to see this story written.” What is strange about O. C. Bailey is that when Mari and I attended my Fifty Year Class of 1960 reunion in 2010, we took a guided tour of the campus which had changed tremendously in the forty years since we had last visited it. As our young female student guide led us by O. C. Bailey, I asked politely if we could go inside to revisit the third floor and the room that I shared with Jarrell Rial when we were freshmen in 1956-57. “I’m so sorry,” the young guide replied in a soft, sweet Southern Belle voice and tone, “but now O. C. Bailey is a women’s dorm.” We wondered if any of the “women” had ever pulled a “trumpet prank” on their janitor.

It is not known what became of Mr. Miller after our graduation from Ouachita in 1960. It is also not known what became of Hunter’s beagle named “Carry Line Buddy’s Hippo Bill.”

Bob Riley, a relative of Hunter’s and a decorated World War II veteran, was a professor of political science at Ouachita during our time there and wore a Rooster Cogburn-type eye patch.

To view a PG-rated clip of Stupefyin’ Jones in action from the movie version of Al Capp’s masterpiece, click here. Coincidentally, my first memory of the mystical powers of Stupefyin’ Jones was during the Christmas holidays in 1960. It was then that Charles Wright and I took two Ouachita coeds on a double date from McGehee to Pine Bluff, a distance of sixty miles, to see the musical film version of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, in which Julie Newmar “stupefied” Jerry Lewis in that now famous scene linked above. 

Sara O’Cain was a Ouachita beauty who married John McCown while both were students at OBC and who bore him two children before our graduation in 1960. Following is a brief biography of Sara contributed by her husband John at the time of the writing of this post in June, 2012:

Sara Lynn O’Cain was born January 12, 1938 in Pine Bluff, AR.

In the movie clip from Lil’ Abner, Jerry Lewis did a good job of showing how I was “stupefied” the first time I saw Sara.

We were married in Pine Bluff, AR on August 29, 1957. Sara died of cancer in Newport News, VA on March 28, 2005.

Just yesterday, for the first time in six years, I had all five of our children together–under one roof.  That was very satisfying.  There was (in order of birth):

Dawn Elizabeth Barnes: Born June 9, 1958 Dumas, AR.

Tana Lynn Haluska: Born July 18, 1959 Dumas, AR.

Julie Patricia McKercher: Born January 22, 1961 in Nurnberg, Federal Republic of Germany.

John Edington McCown Jr.: Born February 16, 1963 in Nurnberg, Federal Republic of Germany.

Porter Malcom McCown: Born June 4, 1965 in Arkadelphia, AR.

We all visited Sara’s grave today in Hampton, VA.

The Ouachita River, which passes directly behind O. C. Bailey Hall, begins in the Ouachita Mountains near Mena, Arkansas, not far from the Oklahoma line. It flows southeastward from Arkansas into Louisiana where it eventually connects with the Mississippi River on its way to New Orleans. To learn more about the Ouachita River and its course, with several photos and a map of its watershed, click here.

Ben and Levi Get Their Deer!

“Take your kids hunting and you won’t have to hunt for your kids!”
—Ted Nugent

My father Arthur Peacock (right) taking my brothers Adrian and Joe on a hunting trip in Southeast Arkansas in the early 1950s (to magnify, click on the photo)

Two weeks ago in my October 10 post about the early life of my cousin Donald, I began with a family photo showing two Peacock brothers: his father Adam Peacock and my father Arthur Peacock.

Brothers Adam (left) and Arthur (right) Peacock as young men sitting on the running board of an old car (to magnify, click on the photo)

A week ago in my October 17 post I wrote about and published photos of my two humorous brothers Adrian and Joe.

Brothers Adrian (left) and Joe (right) Peacock standing against a tree (to magnify, click on the photo)

In earlier posts I have written about and shown photos of our two sons, brothers Sean and Keiron Peacock.

Brothers Sean (right) and Keiron (left) Peacock in about the year 2000 (to magnify, click on the photo)

Now this week I am publishing a follow-up mini-post about younger Peacock brothers: Ben and Levi. It is a press release written by their father Keiron to announce the boys’ success in this year’s Oklahoma youth deer hunt. It is hoped that the press release will be published in the local newspaper, the Sapulpa Daily Herald.

 Peacock Boys Take Deer in Oklahoma’s Youth Season

 By Keiron Peacock

Two young Northeast Oklahoma hunters from Sapulpa, Ben and Levi Peacock, are off to a great start this deer season.

Ben Peacock (age 10) took the first deer of his life on the opening day of Oklahoma’s youth rifle season. Youth season ran from October 19 through 21, 2012, this year. Ben took the deer, a young seven-point buck, on private land in Okfuskee County with an amazing 131-yard shot. Ben was firing a Ruger American Rifle in .243 caliber. The buck field dressed at 100 pounds.

Ben (age 10) with his first deer (to magnify, click on the photo)

Two days later, his brother Levi Peacock (age 12) took a 90-pound doe, field dressed, with a Howa .308. Levi was hunting on the same land and took his deer with a 73-yard shot. It was Levi’s fifth deer in his young life.

Levi (age 12) with his fifth deer (to magnify, click on the photo)

The boys’ father, Keiron Peacock, said that he could not be any more proud of his boys and the shooting skills they have developed in a short period of time.

The boys have an exciting year yet to come. They have both been drawn for a special youth hunt in Okmulgee WMA (Wildlife Management Area), in which they are allowed to take two deer. They also both plan to hunt with their father in Oklahoma’s regular rifle season, which runs from November 17 through December 2, 2012, as well as participate in the special antlerless season during the Christmas holidays.

Note: Below is a photo of Ben and Levi’s father Keiron dressing a deer from an earlier season. Keiron is using the same block and tackle that his grandfather Arthur and his two uncles Adrian and Joe used to dress cattle on their family ranch in Selma, Arkansas, in the 1940s and 50s. I mentioned this fact in my previous post titled “My Two Brothers: A Humorous Pair.”

Keiron, with his sons Levi and Ben, and a deer hanging on the old 1940s and 50s cattle block and tackle (to magnify, click on the photo from a few years ago)

My Two Brothers: A Humorous Pair

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”
—Psalm 133:1 KJV

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
—Proverbs 17:22 KJV

In this post I celebrate the birthdays of my two brothers, Adrian and Joe, who were born on the same date exactly one year apart. Adrian was born on October 20, 1930, and Joe was born on October 20, 1931, in rural Selma, Arkansas, where I was born later, on November 23, 1938.

Adrian in later life (to magnify, click on the photo)

Joe in middle age (to magnify, click on the photo)

It seems that mine was an unplanned birth, seven and eight years after the births of Adrian and Joe. When it became evident that I was indeed going to make my appearance, Mama began to prepare my brothers for my arrival.

One thing she did was tell them that she was ordering me from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Not the one in the outdoor toilet that was used for personal hygiene, but the latest issue (no pun intended) from which many of our other “store-bought” items were purchased. Since Mama figured that I would probably be little and scrawny, she told the boys to pick out the smallest and least attractive infant in the baby items section of the catalog, “’cause if we don’t take him, nobody else will.”

The amusing part is what Adrian and Joe did when I was born in that farmhouse in Selma on the night before Thanksgiving in 1938. As friends, relatives, and neighbors began to drop by to view the newly arrived “bundle from heaven” (actually Sears), the boys would run into Mama’s bedroom and bring out the baby items Mama had also ordered for me. Showing them off, they would proudly exclaim, “And just look what they sent with him!”

Daddy sitting on the backyard fence and holding me as a baby with Old Shep in front (to magnify, click on the photo)

I find it amazing today that in a cattleman’s family which, as Mama often said, “bred cows at the supper table,” boys seven and eight years old did not know where babies came from. But that was a simpler, more innocent era and area.

Adrian and Joe on the fence with Old Shep in front at about the time of my birth in 1938 (to magnify, click on the photo)

But I digress. Back to my brothers and their births. Mama often said that when Joe was born, Adrian, who was exactly a year old, regressed to Joe’s age so that she ended up with two infants instead of one. As an example, I recall her telling how she and my father once tried to take the boys, both on bottles, to a movie, a rare treat for Mama in those hectic days. Unfortunately, Daddy had stuck each of the bottles in a back pocket of his pants. When he sat down in the theater seat and scrunched down to get relaxed, the tops of the bottles were forced off, sending warm milk all down his pants legs. The long ride back home from McGehee to Selma over that rutted gravel road in the dark of night was miserable enough without both babies screaming for milk at the top of their lungs the whole way.

As the two boys grew older they became more and more alike in many ways. The result was a lifelong sibling rivalry. That rivalry was most evident in their devotion to Daddy and their determination to be just like him—especially in his work as a livestock dealer. Both of them began following Daddy from the time they could walk and were inseparable from him, learning “the cow bidniss” from him and emulating him in everything from riding horses to roping and branding calves to slaughtering cattle down under a huge oak tree behind our house.

Adrian and Joe with Daddy on his truck surrounded by hogs though Daddy usually traded in cattle (to magnify, click on the photo made in February 1937 before my birth in November 1938)

One of my earliest memories is watching them as they killed cattle by shooting them right between the eyes with a 22-caliber rifle, causing the poor beasts to hit the ground with a thud almost simultaneous with the sound of the shot. I also recall the piles of dried cow skulls around the slaughter tree, each with a neat little round hole between the eyes.

I also recall accompanying Daddy and my brothers as they delivered meat to the stores in McGehee. Since it was during WWII and meat was rationed, I remember seeing the customers lined up at the front of the stores, ration books in hand, as my family carried the meat in the back door. (To read more about Daddy and our life in Selma, see my earlier posts titled “The Way We Were,” “Yo Recuerdo (I Remember),” and “My Father’s Brand and Seal.”)

Our family (left to right: Adrian, Joe, Daddy, Mama, and me) in front of our house in Selma in the 1940s during one of the rare Southeast Arkansas snowfalls (to magnify, click on the photo)

However, as noted in an earlier post titled “My Favorite Childhood Books,” I differed from my two brothers not only in age, but also in interests. I was more of a Mama’s boy who had rather stay home and help Mama do housework than to go with Daddy and work with cattle—especially buying and selling cattle. To me, working with stubborn ornery cattle was messy and tiring, and buying and selling them was boring and tedious.

Adrian (left) and Joe (right) with me (in the center) when I was about three years old and they were in elementary school in Selma (to magnify, click on the photo)

Not so for Adrian and Joe. They loved to go with Daddy and learn what he called “horsetradin’.” (Note this term as used later in this post by my brother Adrian to describe his business.) Each of them spent most of their adult lives engaged in some type of buying and selling. Joe died in North Little Rock on March 24, 2004, and Adrian died in Helena on November 27, 2010.

Amusing Memories of Joe and Adrian

There are many, many memories of the years my brothers and I spent together, but in this post I want to focus on the humor in their personalities and lives.

In an earlier post titled “Reader’s Digest-Type Humorous Anecdotes” I recounted an amusing anecdote about my brother Joe during his service in the Arkansas National Guard back in the 1950s and 60s.

To read that jewel of military comedy, click here.

In addition, I recall the time in Selma when Joe, just a boy, was writing on the blackboard in the country school. He was so timid that he could not bring himself to ask the teacher if he could be excused to run to the outdoor toilet. Instead, he just tried to “hold it” until recess. This time, however, the urge to relieve himself was just too strong, so Joe just continued to write on the blackboard as he peed in his overalls. Despite the squeals of laughter from the other kids, Joe, the back of his neck beet-red, just went right on writing while urine ran down his pants leg and formed a nice little puddle at his feet.

Adrian and Joe as boys in front of the shotgun type house in which each was born in 1930 and 1931 (to magnify, click on the photo)

On another occasion in that same country schoolhouse, Joe and another boy had done something wrong. Their punishment was to stay after school and fill the wood box for the heater. This task involved taking a little red wagon and walking out to the woodpile, filling the wagon with a few pieces of the heavy wood, and then transporting the fuel back to the school. There, Joe stood on the ground outside an open window and handed the wood up to the other boy who took each piece from him and stacked it in the wood box in the classroom.

As Joe handed up each piece of wood he was complaining about the injustice of the punishment and calling the teacher all kinds of impolite names, saying how mean and cruel and unfair she was. What he didn’t know was that the other boy on the inside was telling the teacher everything that Joe was saying. When confronted by the teacher who asked him what he had been saying, Joe was too embarrassed to even look up, much less to recount his misdeeds. The teacher, knowing how timid he was, let him go with a verbal lesson about the proper respect to be paid to his elders.

On that subject, Mama had always warned Joe and Adrian (just as she did me years later) that under no circumstances were they to go anywhere near the “branch” that ran between our house and the Selma Methodist Church and the general store. However, disregarding her admonitions, on the way home from school one day Joe accepted a challenge to ride his bicycle across the branch on a “stackin’ strip,” a two-by-two-inch board used to separate planks in a pile of lumber at the sawmill.

A rear view of the Selma Methodist Church in the summer of 1984 with livestock and cattle egrets (to magnify the photo provided by our Selma cousin Hal Gibson, click on the photo)

Of course, any thinking person could foretell what was going to happen. Sure enough, as soon as Joe’s bicycle tires began to roll out over the branch, the “stackin’ strip” turned over, and Joe and his bicycle tumbled into the muddy water.

On the way to the house, Joe stopped off at the peach tree, snapped off a small limb, and carried it to the back door where he called out for Mama.

When she came out on the back porch, Joe looked up in what Mama often called “shame-faced” remorse and regret, and with huge crocodile tears streaming down his dirty face, snubbed and sniffed to Mama, “I rode my bicycle off into the branch, so here’s a switch. I reckon you’re just gonna have to switch me.”

Mama later said that she was so moved by Joe’s contrition and his bedraggled appearance that she just didn’t have the heart to switch him. So, like the kind teacher, she let him off with a word of caution about the consequences of disobeying his elders.

As he got older Joe outgrew his timidity and, like Adrian, became quite outgoing and convivial, loving to entertain others with his wit and humor, a trait that I believe I may have also inherited to some minor degree from our grandmother Simmie. (To read about Simeon Sumrall Peacock and her tale-telling and sense of humor, see my earlier post titled “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”)

Adrian (right) and Joe (left) as teenagers standing in front of the house in Selma in which I was born in 1938 (to magnify, click on the photo)

Adrian and Joe with Daddy and Grandma Simmie before my birth (to magnify, click on the photo)

In his eulogy for Joe, his son Perrin Peacock recalled:

“My father loved many and was loved by many.

“He was a lovable man. We think of him fondly, recalling how lovable he was. He was such a character, my dad. But he was so loved I think because he was so giving of himself. He was also willing to show his own inefficiencies and shortcomings—to reveal that he was very human. People loved my dad because he gave of himself to others.

“Never was that so apparent as now, when folks have come up to my sister Desha and me to tell us how much they loved him. They have told us how much he did for them and why he made them feel special. He had that gift—the gift of making others feel special.

“Joe Peacock loved to laugh, joke, and have a fantastic time. He liked to talk on the phone. He liked to talk face to face. He just liked to talk. He was extremely giving. He could motivate anyone in all kinds of circumstances. His optimism was contagious. He was very strong-willed. He loved his family and he loved his many, many friends.

Joe and his family at Easter (to magnify, click on the photo)

“Desha and I never doubted that he loved us and would do anything for us. We are very thankful for that. In this life, you can do without a lot of things. You can do without money, you can do without material possessions, you can do without status or fame or physical comfort. But it’s hard to do without love. My dad always had an abundance of love to give. And if I had to choose one of his many attributes to highlight, I would choose his abundant love.

“Dad, we love you, and we will miss you.”

To conclude this memorable birthday salute to Adrian and Joe, here is a copy of an article about Adrian that appeared in the East Arkansas-North Mississippi edition of a Memphis newspaper back on August 28, 1978. I think you will see the humor in it also.

 “Peacock Parlays Country Roots, Humor Into Business Success”

By LINDA ROSS ALDY
From: The Commercial Appeal
Arkansas Edition
Northwest Miss. Bureau 

WEST HELENA, Ark.—Adrian Peacock is a mixture of Hee Haw’s Junior Samples and Jerry Clower with Sample’s voice and Clower’s humor. [For more about country comedians Junior Samples and Jerry Clower, popular at the time of this writing, click here and here.]

He sells boats, motors, motorcycles and campers here and has a sizeable following for his five-minute radio program in Arkansas and Mississippi.

Peacock, 48, claims the radio show, in which he argues and advertises with the disk jockey, pulled him out of near bankruptcy, but it’s hard to tell when he is serious or being the character he has developed.

“Some feller wanted to know who my publicity agent was. I told him bankruptcy. I figured owning a couple of radio stations wasn’t gonna hurt us any worse than we were hurtin’ already,” Peacock laughed.

[Adrian’s son Johnny, who shared this clipping with me, notes about it: “There's one typo: ‘owning a couple of radio stations’ should read ‘owing…’ He was going to owe them for the advertising (air time used during the phone calls). These were phone calls that were broadcast live every weekday morning at 9:00. At one time he was talking to two announcers from two radio stations—one was KFFA AM 1360 in Helena, and the other one might have been an FM station in Clarksdale, MS. I can’t remember. WKDJ 96.5 FM maybe; it’s the only currently listed country station, but these ads were done in 1978, so I don’t know if there have been any changes. Only the locals would know, especially those who listened to him.”]

“Most folks who just hear me and don’t know me, they come in here and say they thought I was fat, short and bald.”

Just the opposite is true. Peacock looks more like an art professor with his salt and pepper beard.

Adrian and his wife Ann (to magnify, click on the photo)

He claims to have three personalities, one for buying, one for selling and one for getting his customers serviced.

It’s the homespun humor that is making Peacock a personality in the Mid-South.

“I don’t have no sense, I just see things and relate them to everyday life. I saw a tombstone one time that said, ‘Here lies the second fastest gun.’ That’s kind of like a salesman coming in second[,] might as well be last.”

Peacock says he is an unusual guy.

“I jumped the track, but you’re born an individual, you don’t become an individual.”

“I was born and raised in the country. I come from a town [Selma, Arkansas] with a population of 160, 100 of ’em in the cemetery and 60 of ’em living. We didn’t have no indoor plumbing and didn’t get electricity till I was 18 years old. We had high ceilings in the house and my daddy didn’t believe in wasting no money. We used 40-watt bulbs and when you pulled that strang cord, it looked like a star a-shinin’ off in the sky,” Peacock said. [For more about this subject see my earlier post titled “The Way We Were.”]

“When you picked out your cow feed that was when you picked out the color of your underwear. One reason I never learned to swim, much as I love the water, was because I didn’t want nobody to see my flour sack underwear.

“I get my horsetrading natural. I’ve seen my daddy sell my mother’s milk cow with her a-milkin’ it,” he said. [In my fifteen years as a “cowboy” with Daddy I often heard him say that everything in his life was for sale at the right price—“even the wife and kids.”]

One of his favorite stories is about his graduation from high school.

“I was valley-dick-tore-rean of my class and I had me a D-plus average. There were only three boys and me in the class. I was supposed to get a scholarship because it didn’t matter what kinda grades you had if you was valley-dick-tore-rean. I had to give the speech at graduation.

“We had graduation at the Methodist church, well, it was the Baptist church, too, on every other Sunday. [For more on this subject, see my earlier post titled “My ‘Bucket-List Trip’: The Selma Methodist Church.”] I always prided myself on my good memory and I had that speech learned. The president of the college was there and my momma was so proud, she was setting on the third pew.

Interior of the Selma Methodist Church where Adrian gave his graduation speech (to magnify, click on the photo)

“I had the speech in my pants pocket, you know, under that old graduating gown and I rattled off the first paragraph looking down at the floor. I figured I was so smart that I could look up and stare the people in the eye, so I did and my mind went plum blank. I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry, but I have forgotten my speech.’

“So I reached down, clear to my ankles to get the end of that graduating gown and went under it to get the speech out of my pocket and I read every word of it. If there had been a trapdoor under that third pew, my momma would have gone through that thang.”

But with all the scatterbrain, country-boy image aside, Peacock is a smart businessman. He bought his business one morning after breakfast when he didn’t even know it was for sale. He told his wife that night in 1973 and went to work the next morning with less than 30 cents in his pocket.

His goal for the first year was to do $250,000 worth of business. He did $350,000, he said.

Peacock Pleasure Products will be awarded the Diamond Award in October by Evinrude Motors for the highest volume of sales in Eastern Arkansas and has won similar awards from some of his 17 other franchise dealers. [Since Adrian is now deceased, this business no longer exists.]

He doesn’t like hearing about self-made men.

“No man can be successful by himself. It takes the bank, his wife, his customers and his employees and luck . . . Naw, I’m gonna change that. I just told a man this morning I don’t believe in luck.”

He adds, “This is not a success story. I’m still overdrawn at the bank, but my banker, when he let me borrow this money for this business, said, ‘I’m going to let you buy this business because you’ve got two collaterals—you ain’t lazy and you don’t have a clock.’ And that’s what it takes.”

But if Peacock can’t make it selling, there might be room in the entertainment world for a man who has telephone linemen scrambling off the poles to get to a radio for his program and the entire line in a factory shutting down to listen to him every morning.

Note: A framed copy of this article was displayed beside Adrian’s coffin at his visitation and funeral, which like Joe’s, included humorous anecdotes about their lives. As mentioned, this subject of “down-home” folksy humor in our family has been touched on in some previous posts and will be visited again in some future posts.

My Cousin Donald: His Early Years

“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
—Saul Bellow

As suggested by the title and subtitle, this post is about my cousin Donald Peacock, specifically the early years of his life. It is published in commemoration of his seventy-fourth birthday.

Donald and his wife Lucy in about 2004 (to magnify, click on the photo)

It so happens that Donald and I are of the same age. He was born in October of 1938, and I was born in November of that same year, the sons of brothers Adam and Arthur Peacock of Selma, Arkansas. Through the past seventy-four years Donald and I have been friends as well as relatives. We were particularly close during our boyhood years though I was brought up in Selma and McGehee, Arkansas, and he in Montongo and Monticello, Arkansas—twenty-five miles or more from one another.

The Peacock family in about 1941 (front row, left to right: Papa Tom, Grandma Simmie; Vera with Donald on her lap, Dorothy Nell, Adam; Vivian with Jimmy on her lap, Arthur; back row: Floyd Gibson, Troy Gibson, Nellie Jean Gibson, Betty Peacock Gibson; Joe and Adrian Peacock) (to magnify, click on the photo made in front of a Selma church)

However, in his memoirs of his early years it should be evident to anyone who has followed my own early life that, with some notable exceptions, his childhood and youth in SEARK was not greatly different from mine in that same geographical and cultural environment.

So here is Donald’s account of his early years as told in his own words with only slight insertions by me in brackets—primarily for the sake of the uninitiated reader—and a few long paragraphs that I shortened to fit the blog format. Most of the photographs were provided by Donald and me and Donald’s daughter Allison. Some of the photos of Florence Raines and her husband Monroe Barrett were provided by their grandson Stephen Coburn.

MY EARLY YEARS 

By

Donald Peacock, 2007

Donald at age six

My mother, Vera Mae Raines, and daddy, Adam Jessie Peacock, were married December 25, 1934. [My own parents, Vivian Barrett and Arthur Peacock, were married December 25, 1927.] It was a joint ceremony with Florence Raines (her sister) and Clayton Monroe Barrett. [Monroe Barrett was one of my mother's cousins.]

Adam and Vera Peacock

Daddy was the youngest of three children of Thomas Benjamin Peacock and Simeon Marius Sumrall. He dropped out of high school and worked a variety of jobs before marriage: blacksmith, oil fields, farming, etc. He told me that most repairs on Ford Model T cars could be taken care of at the blacksmith’s shop and sometimes required “hay wire” to complete the repair. Even with little formal education he had a wealth of practical knowledge and seemed to know all facets of automobiles, farm machinery, water pumps, etc. He was quite adept at repairs and progressive in what we needed on the farm.

Tom and Simmie Peacock with their first child, daughter Betty, in the early 1900s (sons Arthur and Adam were born later; to magnify, click on the photo)

Mother was the younger of the two daughters of Samuel Joseph Raines and Jody Lee Rogers. They resided about 10 miles north of Monticello near a community called Montongo.

Samuel Joseph Raines. Vera and Florence’s father

Jodie Lee Rogers, Vera and Florence’s mother

Vera and Florence were quite different. Mother was the one who followed her daddy around and helped on his farm and was outgoing. Florence was shy and stayed in the house with her mother. In fact Florence did not want to go to school alone, so she started a year late in order for the two to go together. After high school, mother and Florence went to college in Monticello at Arkansas A & M [now the University of Arkansas at Monticello] for one summer. They both dropped out of college to start teaching school. Mother got her job at Gourd (near Selma where my daddy lived) for $50 per month and stayed at a boarding house. It was quite challenging at her age of 17 having to deal with some students bigger than she was.

Vera and Florence in 1912

Granddaddy Raines owned a fairly large farm with a new home on the highway (Highway 81 at that time). The old home was about a half mile from the highway.  When the girls got married, he gave Florence the new house and 40 acres and he gave Mother more acreage and a piano.

Florence in later years

There was an understanding that Monroe who had done carpenter work would be a major contributor to building a new house for Adam and Vera. Mother did not like the fact that her mother had to move back to the old house in the woods. According to her, Granddaddy told her confidentially that he was confident that she and Daddy would be better able to get by on their own. Florence had quit her first teaching job soon after starting it. Mother never forgave Florence for taking the new house. She also claimed that Monroe’s help was marginal. It forever shaped her compulsion to treat me and my sister equally to the dollar on all gifts.

Monroe Barrett

Our farmhouse, about a quarter mile behind Aunt Florence’s house, was built mostly by Daddy, with some help from Uncle Monroe and probably some hired or bartered help.  I do know that his daddy, Poppa Tom to me, gave him standing timber from his place near Selma.  The local sawmill in Selma cut the logs on the halves (they kept half of the boards instead of charging any fees).  The boards were hauled by wagon to the building site.

Daddy did not want a fireplace because too much of the heat went up the chimney.  He built a brick flue in the center of the house so wood burning stoves could be installed in the living room as well as one of the bedrooms.

The house had a tin roof, and he captured the runoff from rain in steel cistern tanks on each side of the house. From one tank a pipe and faucet ran into the kitchen sink, but was not used for drinking water. That was the entire plumbing in the house.

I know there was some phasing of the construction as some was completed after I was a toddler. The bathroom and sleeping porch were last to be added. There was no electrical service available at that time, but Daddy bought a Delco brand generator and installed a few car batteries to operate a few lights and a DC refrigerator. The generator had to be run every day by manually starting it. Prior to this, milk or some perishable food was kept in a bucket submerged in the well during the summer.

My sister, Dorothy Nell, was born on January 30, 1936, and I was born on October 12, 1938. Mother was afraid that Dorothy Nell was too frail and skinny and was always trying to get her to eat more. She did not have that problem with me. Unknown to Mother, she developed diabetes during her pregnancy with me. I was born about a month late and weighed 12 pounds and 4 ounces. The doctor broke my right arm between the shoulder and elbow by pulling on me. Mother bled profusely and remained in bed for several days. My arm was taped to my chest to heal.

Dorothy Nell with cousins Joe and Adrian about the time of the births of Donald and Jimmy (to magnify, click on the photo)

That October was unusually hot, and mother said that I had a lot of heat rash. I started walking at 7 months and apparently got in everything such as climbing on top of the upright piano and eating baking powder or flour. Mother grabbed me by my ankles and spanked my back to dislodge the powder and get me to breathing. She was always afraid I would develop diabetes and did her best to keep me away from sweets, even letting Dorothy Nell have candy while hidden behind a door. Throughout my early adult life she would remind me to get my blood sugar checked once a year.

In September of 1939, Florence gave birth to her only child, Nan. I grew up closer to Nan than to my sister due to our ages and interests. Granddaddy Raines who was born in 1870 was fairly elderly by the time I can remember him. He had one glass eye and always used a cane. His old house was about a quarter mile from ours, and he visited every day. We had a radio, and he listened every day at 5:00 pm to get the news of World War II.

Nan Barrett in 1955 (to magnify, click on the photo)

I heard a lot of his tales from his past. Frequently Nan and I would both sit in his lap and ask for a repeat of some story he had told many times. It was like replaying your favorite video or DVD. Some were not politically correct by today standards as he had played practical jokes on uneducated black workers.

One story I remember well took several days to set up. He kept telling the workers about an escaped crazy woman that was killing people. Every day or so he would mention that she had been spotted coming toward this area from another community. Then he talked one field hand into bringing his friend down a trail through the woods. Meanwhile he had dressed up in some of Grandmother’s clothes and had a big knife (shades of the “Psycho” movie including the bonnet). He thought it was the most funny that the man who knew about the joke ran faster than the other one when Granddaddy jumped out from a tree.

He also told us about walking alongside a covered wagon when he was 13 as his family immigrated from one of the Carolinas to Arkansas. He once dated two girls at the same time, and one wanted him to shave his mustache.

As a joke he shaved one side.

Granddaddy and his brothers and cousins competed in physical feats such as running, jumping, and probably wrestling. He claimed to be the only one who could high jump his height of approximately 5 feet 8 or 9 inches. When they were in Monticello, they would go by the cotton gin and see who could register the most weight on the scales by pulling on some of the balance beams.

When Granddaddy found out that his eye had to be removed by a surgeon in Little Rock, Daddy only had a pickup truck. Since a car was needed to have the space for all occupants to make the 90-mile trip, a deal was made with Mother’s first cousin, Bill Henry. Daddy could swap vehicles but would change all the tires from his truck to the car for the trip. Rubber was rationed and tires did not last nearly as long as they do now.

Grandmother Raines did just about all the chores at their house including the garden. She was some 18 or 20 years younger than Granddaddy and was in good health except for an occasional migraine headache. She was usually very quiet, but I can remember being told repeatedly, “Don’t slam the screen door!”

Of course I had a closer relationship with my maternal grandparents since Daddy’s family lived in Selma. All their kids and grandkids called them “Momma” and “Poppa,” except Dorothy Nell and me. Mother taught us to say, “Momma Simmie” and “Poppa Tom. ” I suppose it was because we were grandchildren instead of sons and daughters. Speaking of names, Daddy’s birth certificate or family Bible showed his middle name as “Jessie,” but Mother told him that was the feminine spelling and got him to use “Jesse” instead. There were many Jesses in Peacock history, but apparently the person writing in the Bible didn’t know the different gender spelling.

Tom and Simmie Peacock in later life (to magnify, click on the photo)

We visited Selma at least once per month, and Momma Simmie would cook a big dinner. Back then we had breakfast, dinner, and supper. For many years after growing up, I wasn’t sure if someone mentioning dinner was talking of a noon or evening meal. One of Mama Simmie’s quotes was, “It doesn’t do any good to cook up a big bunch of food. It just gets eaten right away.”

Poppa Tom mostly just sat on the front porch in a wooden rocking chair. He had facial characteristics of an American Indian. Supposedly some Indian woman was in his lineage, but I never got the details. He even slept there some and insisted that he never closed his eyes many nights.

I would play with my cousins, mainly Jimmy Peacock. Lumber from the Selma sawmill was stacked to dry right across from Poppa Tom’s house. Sometimes we would play there. I remember Jimmy telling me about Superman as I had never seen the comic book. [Superman comics appeared in 1938, the year Donald and I were born.] Poppa Tom’s oldest grandchild, Floyd Gibson, did a lot of chores and took care of his farm. Daddy told me that as a child he frequently would go to sleep on the bench at the dining table after supper. Once after being warned several times, he was left on the bench to spend the night.

Jimmy Peacock at about age nine (to magnify, click on the photo)

Floyd Gibson (front left, and his family: sister Nellie Jean, brother Troy, father Ray, and mother Betty Peacock Gibson; to magnify, click on the photo)

Daddy was farming and running cows about the time I came along. He purchased some more land from Granddaddy, and I think some from others who had moved away. We always had a large garden, and I hated helping Mother pull out Bermuda grass and shake off the dirt from the roots before throwing it over the fence. Daddy always had a patch of tomatoes and sometimes cabbage and cotton, but mostly had cattle.

He planted tomatoes in wooden flats early in the spring and kept them in a cold frame until the weather was warm. The cold frame had a cover of canvas which could be pulled back in the day and then covered with pine straw at night if it was too cold. One year after the tomatoes were harvested the cows got into the patch and ate the tops off the vines. After a rainy late summer, the plants made a nice fall crop.

Also next to our house was 5 acres of Alberta peaches. The orchard required a lot of work, pruning, thinning, poisoning, picking, wrapping the mature but not ripe peaches in bushel baskets. Tomatoes were also sold as “green wraps,” and trucks would come to our house to pick them up in bushel baskets with lids attached.

Daddy made a tool out of a broom handle stuck in a large rubber hose. When the trees were too loaded in small peaches, we would beat the limbs with the hose to knock off some peaches to make sure the ones left would grow to a large size. One year we had a hailstorm that knocked off a lot of peaches just as they were about ready to pick. We gathered them and washed them in galvanized tubs.

Speaking of galvanized tubs, Dorothy and I would fill one with a little water in the summer and place it outside in the sun. This was our warm bath water and prevented the house from getting so hot by firing up the wood cook stove.

Dorothy Nell and Donald as kids in the country (to magnify, click on the photo)

Daddy had a black family of sharecroppers living in an old house on one of the properties. O. G. Brazil was the man, and Noreen was his common-law wife. O. G. did the hard work such as splitting posts and firewood as well as plowing with a mule.

Later on we got a Ford Ferguson tractor (used I’m sure). I enjoyed talking with O. G., especially if it was raining and he couldn’t work. We would stand under one of the sheds watching it rain. I’m not sure what the financial arrangement was with O. G., but Daddy had to be careful not to pay him all his share at one time. Once he went to town and gambled it away in a crap game. O. G. could read and write, but I don’t think Noreen could. Mother would pass along our outgrown clothes for their kids.

Sometime during the 40’s we got electricity from the Rural Electrical Association which I assume was a part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. [See my story of getting electricity in my Selma home in 1947 as described in my earlier post titled "The Way We Were."]

The well in the back yard was filled in, and Daddy installed a water pump in the yard to pump water in the kitchen. There was a long suction pipe from a spring up the hill on the south side of the house.

Even though we lived in the sticks at the end of a dirt road, had an outhouse and very little cash, we did not consider ourselves poor or deprived. Our cousins and neighbors had a similar lifestyle. There was always plenty to eat, and our needs were simple. Mother saved the flour and feed sacks that were designed for making clothes after the contents were gone. We also had store-bought clothes as well as hand-me-downs from relatives that were older. Much of our shopping was done through the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. When I wore out the elbow on a long-sleeved shirt, it became a short-sleeve shirt for summer. Similarly long pants to short pants.

Donald and childhood friend and dog on the family farm (to magnify, click on the photo)

For entertainment we had cards, dominos, and jigsaw puzzles. Mother was particularly impressed that I at a very young age could put together the adult puzzles. Dorothy Nell played with dolls or read books, and I checked every cow, hog, horse, and watermelon and played with the dogs. Nan got a horse for Christmas one year, and we rode it together. I can remember the blister on my butt from sitting on the back edge of the saddle.

We probably made it to the movies about once a calendar quarter. There was always the war news, a cartoon, coming attractions, and then the feature. [See my reference to this subject of movies in my earlier post "The Way We Were."] Nan and I then would play the main characters such as the war pilots who crashed behind enemy lines. We would eat unwashed radishes or onions out of the garden to stay alive in those dire circumstances and live in her tree house that Uncle Monroe built in a large crepe myrtle.

Nan and I occasionally got into trouble, and I recall one switching from Aunt Florence. Whereas my mother used a slender shoot (small limb) from a peach tree for any switching, Aunt Florence used a grass tassel to switch our legs. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing, but Nan cried.

Florence (center), her daughter Nan (right), and Nellie Jean Gibson (left) in Hot Springs in about 1955 (to magnify, click on the photo)

I started my home schooling at an early age. Apparently after Dorothy Nell started school at Montongo, she would share her lessons with me. I’m sure Mother arranged this and also taught me. By age five, I could read children’s books and do some writing such as signing my name. It irritated Mother when the librarian in Monticello would not let me sign for my own books. She had a rule that you had to be at least 7 years old to check out your own books.

In the fall of 1943, Mother had an opportunity to join her cousin by marriage, Bessie Raines, as the second teacher at Montongo School, and I went along to be in the first grade. The school house consisted of one large room with a removable partition to provide two classrooms. In the entrance were two cloak rooms for our coats and lunches. Heat was provided with wooden stoves and air conditioning with open windows. Cousin Bessie, as I was taught to call her, had the first four grades, and Mother had the fifth through eighth grades.  After graduating from Montongo, a student would attend either Monticello or Drew Central, the county school. My classroom had the only stage which was used for school programs with the partition pushed back. Each grade sat in their row of desks and a long bench was at the front of the class. One class at a time went to the bench for personalized instruction.

Vera during teaching years

Of course recess was our favorite activity, and during lunch break we played “work up” softball, because there usually were not enough participants to have two teams. There was wild garlic in the ball field, and you didn’t want to slide just anywhere. Also it was most fun to be selected as the one to go outside during class and clean the erasers. The erasers collected so much chalk dust after a while that a lucky student would get to bang them on a rock or side of the building to knock out the dust.

One year the students got to plant pine seedlings in a hillside next to the highway. I think it was a program to control erosion, but whatever, we were glad to spend a couple of days outside. Another time, I got into the biggest trouble of my childhood. During lunch break, we could cross the highway and purchase items from a mom-and-pop-type store. The Montongo area actually had two roadside stores in sight of one another. One was called “The Loop” after the light rail loop in Chicago. I guess the owner had lived in Chicago. (Back to the crime) I followed the lead of some older students and stole a banana. My cousin, Paul Henry, told my sister who told my mother. I got my worst whipping when we got home and later had to apologize and pay for the banana. As far as I remember no one else was caught and punished. Bananas are still my favorite fruit.

In addition to the annual Christmas program, we had a Mulligan Stew party in the fall, probably on Halloween. A black pot was placed on an open fire and every family brought some food such as vegetables or meat to make the stew. The stew was cooked until the meat fell off the bone. I liked it okay, but I remember the stringy bits of squirrel meat in my bowl. At one of the Christmas programs, I got to participate before I was going to school. I quoted a nursery rhyme about Little Jack Horner while dressed in riding pants like Teddy Roosevelt wore.  Later that night as I was going to bed in my longhandle underwear, Daddy teased me about going on stage in my underwear, and I started crying. Mother reassured me that I was indeed dressed and gave Daddy a hard time.

He loved to joke with kids and repeated numerous little ditties, such as my name is “George Wonkcom, shoe nonkcom, short name, and speakit quick” or “go to Guinea and holler papah rak.” The first was in response to a child who asked his name, and the second was a mild version of where to go. In case you didn’t get it, guinea hens squawked something like “papah rak, papah rak.” In response to “how are you doing,”  he would say, “fine as frog hair, split 16 ways and sanded down.”  He considered that finer than “fine as hen’s teeth.”

Donald and Adam in Hot Springs (to magnify, click on the photo)

By the end of the first semester of school, Mother with Cousin Bessie’s blessing decided that I fit in better with the second-grade students, since none of them came to school so learned as I. So, there I was at six years old in the second grade with the much older kids. Although Mother never regretted this move, I ran into difficulties in social life and athletics in high school. So I turned my efforts toward scholarship, avoiding fights, and joining the band.

We went to church at Mount Zion Presbyterian Church, which was located a couple of miles north near Relfs Bluff. It was a small white frame building with a cemetery behind it. However, Mother’s deceased family members were buried at Camp Ground Church (not sure of denomination) located a couple of miles south of our place. The women and children went into the church on arrival, but the men stood on the front steps until after the singing started. I still remember seeing the neck size of 17 on the white shirt of one fat man standing on the steps. The size was printed very low on the shirt, but he was fat enough for that part of the shirt to show.

One summer during Bible School, we made wooden hymnal holders which were attached to the backs of the pews. At about the age of 9, following Mother’s prompting, I went to the front to be confirmed. Worship services were very simple with a goodly amount of singing. There were no icons, stained windows, robes, etc. We did however have cardboard fans with wooden handles to fan our faces in the summer. [See my earlier post titled  "Thank God, I'm a Country Boy."]

Both Daddy and Uncle Monroe got jobs in government agencies related to agriculture. Daddy worked in Star City, which was about 10 miles north of our farm. During my early elementary school years, Uncle Monroe got a job in Hampton, Arkansas, and the whole family moved there. Of course, I missed my closest playmate.

Donald and cousin Lee Gibson in about 1948 before Donald moved to town (to magnify, click on the photo)

About 1947, Daddy bought a very large corner lot in Monticello on West College Avenue.

Grandmother and Granddaddy Raines moved into the house. It was configured as a duplex with each side consisting of two large rooms plus bath. There was an entry hall and back door hall. They initially rented out one side. Also Aunt Florence lived there for a while after Uncle Monroe died. Later she moved into the Baptist Home for Children as a house mother. [After the death of my father Arthur, in her later years my mother Vivian Peacock also worked at the Baptist Home for Children with Florence where Mama died in 1973.] Also Nan lived there part of the time that her husband Doug Coburn was in the Air Force.

I’m not sure of the sequences of events, but Mother got a job teaching in Monticello, we moved in town in 1948 [the same year that my family moved to McGehee from Selma], and Montongo School closed. Most of the students transferred to Drew Central.

Ever the one to get a bargain, Daddy bought a military-style barrack and had it moved adjacent to my grandparents in town.  (I drove by the site in 2005 and both houses had been replaced, but the original farm house Daddy built and later moved on the lot was still in use). After build outs, it was a three bedroom, one bath house with asbestos siding and a carport. I think it had been part of a confinement camp for European POW’s or possibility Japanese Americans.

There had been more than one of these camps in the surrounding area. After the war and release of the occupants, the one closest to Monticello was turned into a county fairground. While still at Montongo, I was in the 4-H Club and took a calf to the county fair at an early age. I didn’t win any prizes, but I can remember dumping the sawdust out of my new cowboy boots and finding out I had forgotten to wear socks.

Montongo had a much briefer school year than Monticello, so Mother took a teaching job at Monticello Elementary for a few weeks after Montongo finished. I attended the last of fifth grade there to have a place to go while she was at work. I did not like many vegetables, especially spinach, but to get the Dixie cup of ice cream, you had to complete your cafeteria lunch. Somehow I would spread it around on my plate or talk someone into eating part of it in order to get that dessert. Once I was reprimanded for giggling when Mrs. Canter was talking about breeding horses. Another time I got in trouble for going down the stairs three steps at a time.

We were still living at the farm during some or most of the sixth grade, and I had a friend from school spend the night at the farm. His name was Sonny (Zach McClendon, Jr.) and he was a born naturalist. I got to show him our animals and all the bird nests I had spotted. He had collections of butterflies and bird eggs and was already stuffing birds. Once he accidentally left a candidate for stuffing in his desk over the weekend. An aroma awaited us on Monday. Sonny’s dad owned the cotton gin and probably other enterprises. It was quite a change for me to spend the night at his house. It was the first time I had ever had soup for breakfast. When he asked his mom for a clean shirt, she told him which drawer to get one. He opened it and selected one of several brand new shirts still folded with pins in them.

My first schoolyard girl friend at Monticello was Laura Lee Stephenson, a cute blonde. Her dad owned the local funeral parlor. The only picture I had to give her was a snapshot of me with my calf’s rear end most prominently displayed in the photo. She later told that her daddy asked which one was me. These classmates were way ahead of me in worldly ways. She admitted to changing out the salt and sugar at home for April Fool’s Day. Then on Valentine’s Day, she gave me a chocolate heart. Shucks, I didn’t even think of a gift, much less be able to buy one.

Donald in 1948 about the time he began school in Monticello (to magnify, click on the photo)

Work in progress . . . .