Cars

We’ve come a long way in a short time. In less than three generations, we’ve seen automobiles invented and viewed as temporary fads. They became fashionable but out of reach for the masses. They were virtually unavailable because of a nationwide war effort only to rapidly emerge as a viable transportation alternative in a post-war economy. And now it is not uncommon that they often outnumber the number of licensed drivers in a household.

I entered this progression about in the middle as the car was coming into its own after the war. In hindsight, that was probably the most fun.

In the late 1940’s and early 50’s, cars were rapidly becoming commonplace. So common, in fact, that programs were being developed in high schools to teach students to drive correctly Enter my Dad.

In those days, high school football coaches did not just coach. They taught mathematics and physics. They coached track when football was not in season. And, for an additional stipend, they taught driver’s education. When you reflect on it, it seems a little comical. The people teaching students how to drive cars were the ones who were least likely to be able to afford them.

There was usually a car parked in our yard starting in 1949. But it wasn’t ours. It was the Pontiac furnished by W. H. Nelson Motors to the high school. A brand-new Pontiac with an additional clutch and brake installed on the passenger side where the instructor rode. Rather than leave the car unattended on the campus at night, they preferred that the teacher bring it home and assure its safety. They couldn’t have picked a better protector than my Dad.

The idea of using it for personal business would never have occurred to him. It wasn’t our car. And it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Even when we made the infrequent trips to see my father’s parents in Pelehatchie, MS, we went in a borrowed car and the driver's ed car stayed home in the yard.

There was a single exception, however. My mother, also a teacher, had a hard and fast rule that she would never teach in a school that had one of her children as a student. And when her school aged children occupied all of the schools in which she could have taught in Moss Point, she took a job in Ocean Springs, a distance of about 20 miles from our home. There were two other teachers from Moss Point and Pascagoula who taught in Ocean Springs and she was able to arrange transportation to and from work except for Thursday afternoons. So on Thursdays, the Shields kids had a great adventure. The high school approved the use of the driver’s education car and my dad would drive us all the way to Ocean Springs to pick up Mama. It seemed like a million miles away.

Across the toll bridge in Pascagoula, into Gautier (then not much more than a wide place in the road whose main industry was a truck stop and café with a few small detached cabins in the back called Earl’s Place. I was always fascinated by the fact that Earl’s Place actually openly advertised that it sold beer. No other place that I can think of was so brazen. I can assure you that my father never stopped.). Continuing on Highway 90, it wasn’t far before we came to the train trestle that crossed over the road. It was only about 13 feet in clearance. It’s still there, so I can verify the height. We had our ritual that when passing under the tracks, we must blow the car horn and hear the sound reverberate. Going and coming. Past the turnoff to the Fontainebleau Beach on onto Government Street to the Ocean Springs School. Pick up Mama and reverse the route. No side trips. It wasn’t our car!

The 1950’s brought change. The biggest one was my father leaving the teaching and coaching profession for health reasons and returning to the shipyard. While this was a decision made of necessity and not preference, it was also a decision that provided greater income to the family. And then, in 1952-53, it happened. A family car was purchased. And in 1955 a new one replaced it. We had arrived. And life was changed forever.

Today, children often have their own cars before finishing high school. They get new ones as graduation presents. They know of no other way of living life. They have my pity. I believe that there is no way anyone can appreciate what they have without fully knowing what it is like to not have it. Where is the fun in that? Perhaps that was the reason that I was so enthusiastic when I got my first car. I knew!

That’s the way I remember it.

The First Bicycle and the Western Flyer

It all came back to me yesterday when I saw my grandson show me his newly acquired skills riding a two-wheeled bicycle in his driveway. No training wheels required. Even today, this remains a major stepping stone on the rite of passage to manhood.

Will's bike is a new shiny Christmas present that has been waiting for him to have an appropriate place to learn to ride it. Hurricane Katrina took care of the old driveway and the rebuilding process has only now allowed the new drive to be available.

Will's six. The same age as I was when I got my first two wheeler. Mine was a bit different. The war was just over and bicycles were not readily available. In fact, there were none available in Moss Point or Pascagoula. Maybe there were just none my parents could afford, but that would never stop them. There was always a sign that needed painting and my father would take on whatever sideline of work necessary to provide us with things we really needed. Like bicycles.

So the nets were cast far and wide and a bike was found in Mobile. Uncle Pete and Aunt Mary negotiated the deal and delivered it on their regular Sunday trip. This was going to be the big (only) birthday present and presents didn't come any bigger than a new bike. Well, it wasn't quite new. But a Dad who was a wizard with paint could make it look that way and it would be the newest one in the neighborhood. But when it was unloaded from Pete's 1941 Ford, faces fell and hearts were broken. Not mine! Daddy's! It was a GIRL's bicycle! And in no way was that going to be acceptable!

All other activities stopped. The search was on. Within a couple of hours a piece of steel tubing or pipe was located that was approximately the size of the bicycle's frame. A welding machine was found. A welder was enlisted. (It is appropriate to remind the reader once again that this is a Sunday afternoon in November. No stores are open. People are spending their time with their families. Work is the last thing on their minds).

Tubing is cut and shaped. Welds are made and cleaned. Then ground smooth. Primer is applied. Painting is done to match the color of the fenders. Pin stripes and accents are done freehand by the resident artist. And all of this was still well underway when I went to bed that night. But the next morning, the paint was dry and the birthday present was ready. A new bicycle. A BOY's bike! And I was one happy kid. And my Dad was happier.

And that bike served me well until I made enough money to buy my next one, the Cadillac of all bicycles, the Western Flyer.

A lot of people think that Walmart is a recent innovation in marketing that has made our lives more convenient. How absurd!

Harold Monroe did the same thing for Moss Point more than a half century earlier (without the groceries - Albert Graham took care of that! And Mr. Graham delivered to the house!). There was NOTHING you could not get at the Western Auto store. Hardware, appliances, radios and later televisions, lawnmowers, knives, guns, and bicycles. Not just any bicycle. The coveted Western Flyer. With a bike like that, a boy could run his paper route in half the time, expand his route, increase his market, make more money, and be the envy of all his friends at the same time. There was no down side to this deal. It didn't get any better than this.

I remember the day as though it was yesterday. I finally had the money! The school day ended and I walked to the Western Auto without a thought because it was a one way hike. I'd be riding in style on the return trip. There was a small hiccup when we had to unpackage the bike and assemble it. And inflate the tires. And that put my paper route about an hour or so late. But it was a weekly paper. What would it hurt to wait another hour for week old news?

It was almost dark when I finally started my deliveries. In no time, I was riding under the street lights (on the streets that had them). For the other streets, I had a brand new light on the front fender. Another proof that I had made a wise investment. But for some reason, the longer I rode and delivered, the more difficult the ride became. And by the time I got home, I couldn't understand why my legs were so tired. It couldn't be the bicycle.

The last part of my paper route was through a new development called Griffin Heights. And the method of paving roads in those days was to lay down a coat of wet tar on the street and then pour loose gravel on top of the tar. And while I had been taking delivery of the Western Flyer, the city had been paving Griffin Heights. The more I rode on those dark, freshly tarred streets, the more tar affixed itself to my tires. Eventually, the tires and wheels were so caked with tar that it was scraping against the wheel supports. Remember me saying how happy my Father was with my first bicycle? He was equally unhappy with me that night!

I was telling my parents the truth about the streets. In the dark I never saw the tar. And in the light of my house, I could not only see it on my new prized possession, I could see it on my shoes and the bottom of my pant legs. I had that bicycle for years. It was the last bicycle I ever had as a child. And I loved it. But I NEVER got all the tar off of it!

That's the way I remember it.

The Way That Mama Made It....

The comment that has probably wounded more feelings and hurt more marriages than any other is some unthinking husband blurting out, "It's OK, but it's not the way that Mama made it". Once those words escape your lips, there is no way to redeem yourself. You've made your bed but you dare not sleep in it. That would require closing your eyes and you realize that it will never be safe to do that again.

When the truth is told, all Mamas may not have been the grand champion of cooking. In my case, mine was probably a little better than average. But for some reason, the things that our Mamas did excel in are the things we remember so vividly. And those that they may not have been so good at have become totally unimportant. My memories are cornbread and biscuits. Neither had a recipe written down. Had it been, I would be wealthy if I had no more customers than my siblings! And there is a probability that neither of these recipes may have been as totally delicious as I recall them. But I can think about them and salivate!

Most people would describe the majority of our food as plain Southern cooking. Most people don't know that this is one of the highest compliments that can be paid a cook.

Plain Southern cooking means taking what is available (or what you can afford) and make it feed however many people show up at the table and to do it in a tasty (usually) way. The exception to that rule was when the menu was determined by a request from my father who happened to love some foods that some of us were less than enamored with. I've heard stories of cooks who could make calf's liver appeal to anyone's palate. My mother was not one of those cooks.

But, like all forms of adolescent influence, democracy was not present at the Shields' dinner table. If we didn't like something, we got to complain. Once. After that, we were allowed to sit there until we decided we did like it. We may not have eaten all of it when we left the table (after receiving permission) but we knew we had eaten the last bite that we would see before the next meal time.

I remember most meals during the week as being pretty ordinary. Breakfast was breakfast. Cereal, oatmeal, occasional eggs and bacon, pancakes, sometimes waffles (my personal favorite) on the weekends. Lunch was normally a hurriedly concocted sandwich except on Sunday. And the evening meal, referred to in our house as supper, was the time when the cooking was done unless there was a ball game or some event that required the presence of children, parents, or both. Then things got complicated. But the special times for me were Saturday night and Sunday after church.

Saturday night was hamburger night. With French fries and iced tea. And the special part about it was that it was the night when you could have all you wanted. Patties fried in a black cast iron skillet. Two, three, even four hamburgers. Not the size that we see today. In fact, looking back on them, they were pretty puny. But we thought they were great! And the French fries cut from fresh potatoes could fill an entire plate!

The one o'clock meal on Sunday followed church and was called Sunday dinner...not lunch. It was a sit down affair and often included my Aunt and Uncle from Mobile who would time their arrival to occur a few minutes before the food was served. Either fried chicken, pot roast or 'steak' with all the 'fixin's' are the meals I remember most. The fixin's were fresh vegetables, rice or mashed potatoes and gravy, dried lima beans or blackeyed peas, and on special occasions, stuffed eggs. I still prefer dried beans to fresh ones.

The steak in question was no more than a quarter of an inch thick and had a round bone somewhere in it. Yes, I know what round steak is...but back then I thought it was the only kind of steak in the world. It easily fit into a nine inch skillet and was floured and browned on both sides. Finally it was cut into the same number of pieces as there were eaters. But not necessarily the same sized pieces. Big is big and small is small. There was a relationship between the size of the eater and the size of the serving. And the chicken was 'a' chicken. Singular. One. Uno. Unlike today, chicken backs were cooked and served. I can't remember a time in the last twenty years that I've seen a chicken back cooked. My father got served first so that limited the chances for white meat being available by the time the platter reached the last few people at the table.

And maybe, just maybe, there could be dessert. Lemon icebox pie and egg custard were standouts.

As time passed, Mama did less and less of the cooking for the family gatherings and the acknowledged culinary champion of Moss Point Shieldses became a title held by my wife.

You learn a lot by listening at the dinner table. And one of the most important lessons men can learn is that it's smart to compliment and thank the cook. Cooks like that. My wife always treasured the times when my Dad would eat with us and pronounce her meals as fittin'.

Fittin' is not a word that gets used much any more. But any cook worth her salt knows a compliment when she hears one! And fittin' was the highest form of praise!

And that's the way I remember it.

The Young Men and the River

Living in close proximity to bodies of both fresh and salt water led all of us to a familiarity with most forms of aqua-fun. Swimming, fishing, water skiing were everyday parts of our lives and were immediately taken for granted as something that everyone did. And that made it even more special when the opportunity came to do something totally different. Unique. An adventure!

Moss Point is located within five miles of the Gulf of Mexico and is situated on both the Escatawpa River and the Pascagoula River. Today, the Pascagoula River is recognized as the very last free-flowing, unobstructed river in the United States. During the 1950's, it seemed even more primative to pre-teen aged boys who were members of Boy Scout Troop 220.

Boy Scouting was a central part of the youth of almost every boy in my neighborhood. Parents approved of scouting and they approved of the scoutmaster, Sam Wilkes. Sam was about the same age as most of our Dads and, at the time, had no kids. He later rectified that. But the time he spent with us was time we treasured. We met weekly in what we called the Scout Hut, a small shell of a building with a fire place and a few chairs and a table. We did the usual things done in scouting. Games, skills, merit badges. Some of us (make that some of them) even advanced to the rank of Eagle Scout. Our patrol excelled in the Camporees held in the Lyons Lake area. We were always as good as our competition in the areas of camp site preparation, fire building, knot tying, and the like. But when it came to the morse code competion, we had no peer. Samuel B. would have been proud.

But the Fall approached and Mr. Wilkes broke the news. There would be a canoe trip. Canoes would be rented and transported to the bridge over the Chickasawhay River north of Lucedale. By road, this was probably a fifty mile trip. By water and its meandering method of path selection, it was a bit farther.

The day came. Carson, John Lundy, Mike, George, Neal Luther, Bill, Butch and a few more whose names don't come immediately to mind, clamoring out of cars and racing down the embankment from the bridge to the river. Half carrying the canoes and half dodging them as they slid down the damp clay path toward the point of shoving off. Sam Wilkes was no one's fool. He knew that all canoeists were not created equally, so he paired strong paddlers with less skilled ones. And he know that anything that had to be treated respectfully (bedding and food headed that list) went into the boat he was in.

Then came three days of racing, swimming, forcing the other canoes onto logs in the river and trying to overturn them, choosing the fork in the river to take without even considering that our scoutmaster wasn't about to let the wrong one be chosen , climbing the sheer clay 'bluffs' that hindsight would likely measure as no more than forty feet in height, sleeping on sandbars, fighting mosquitoes, blistered hands so raw that the blisters broke and then paddling on, and contracting some of the most severe cases of sunburn ever. And we thought every minute of it was fun.

We were greeted at Lundy Williams fishing camp in Escatawpa that first year. We had paddled through Little River into the East Pascagoula and there were the parents on the bank, waiting as though we had been gone for years. Photographers were there. We were featured in the newspaper. We had conquered the wildness. We had mastered the rivers. We were MEN!

Every so often, someone still drags out a picture of those boys. Tired and smiling. I look at those pictures and I think of every minute of the trip. But what I remember most isn't in the pictures.

Its the break of day when light first showed through the tops of the cypress and pines. The sun light played on the top of the warm late Summer water on a cooler morning and a fine mist rose not unlike fog. And the mist sparkled as though there were tiny silent explosions taking place. I was thirteen years old and I thought it was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. I still do. I hope I get to see it again.

But if I don't, that's the way I remember it.

Is Life a Spectator Sport?

Good evening.

My name is Richard and I'm a sportaholic.

Always have been. My family will verify that it's been true since childhood. My wife and daughter will attest to it. Even my grandchildren have figured it out. I watch sports. I study sports. I play sports (less each year, but I continue to try).

I watch the standard fares. Football, baseball, basketball. I watch golf. I watch gymnastics. Even the kind with ribbons and rings and knives. I watch wrestling.But not the kind on late night television with 600 pound men making obscene gestures at Donald Trump. I watch card games on television. I've even been known to watch bicycling.

I boycott watching very few sports. I crave seeing people do things extraordinarily well. I love the Olympics; winter and summer. What on earth would someone who has spent their life in the sweltering climate of the Gulf Coast know...or care...about the winter Olympics? But with a little effort and a little study, you can become well enough informed to make many of your contemporaries believe that you actually have some idea of what you are talking about.

How did I become hooked? Very simple. It's genetic. I got it from my father and cultivated it into an art form. He was a first generation addict and he couldn't break the habit. Sadly, he probably got so hooked on his first experience that he had no chance of even wanting to try. For him, there was no rehab.

He was a player. But he was a better spectator.

His two youngest boys were always in some form of competition. And when they were, he was there. Little League, Babe Ruth League, Junior High, Senior High, Junior College, Senior College, regular season, All-Star games. Always there. Watching. And never saying a word. Not a screaming parent berating coaches or umpires or referees. Just watching. Studying.
Oh, you might hear an opinion or suggestion after the game, but it was always constructive and never in opposition to anything a coach might have instructed.

He made sure that his only girl got equal treatment. Baseball as a kid, golf programs and tournaments, she even got her own shotgun with a red stock. His daughter...the brightest of the lights of his life...even turned participation in the band into a sport for him. The truth was that he may have hated the band. But he loved his daughter. And if she was going to be a part of a performance, he was going to be there to see her lead it without a word of complaint.

But following these children was an easy thing. I was the challenge.

When you are a sportaholic, you want to be there for the action. What do you do when there is none? Perhaps it's a little thing to many, but a single event stands out in my memory that really defines a lot of what I always saw in my father.

I was a senior in high school and on the basketball team. I was not a starter. In fact, I played behind an all-conference center who was taller and more athletic than I was. He led the team in scoring and rebounding. He was going to go to college on a scholarship. He was the star and rightfully so! I was on the second team. I was thankful that there were only two teams.

We advanced to the playoffs after a fairly successful season and reached the semi-finals. The game would be played in McComb, almost 200 miles away. And it was expected to be close.
My Dad worked in the shipyard where I would later spend most of my career. He worked as a loftsman. And when he didn't go to work, he didn't get paid. With a wife and four kids, he needed to get paid.

It was an afternoon game and, as expected, it was close. I don't remember the score but there are three things I do remember.

1. We won.
2. I did not get in the game. I didn't expect to unless the game became one-sided and that probably wasn't going to happen.
3. Just as the game was about to start, I saw my Dad come in. Alone. Quietly, as always. He sat by himself and watched. Studying. He was going to be there just in case I got to play. And he had known when he left work that wasn't going to happen!

Like I said, he was a player. But a better spectator! In his eyes, my life was the spectator sport and he wasn't going to miss any of it. He didn't have time for rehab. The next game was going to be in Jackson and he would be there.

And that's the way I'll remember it.