Above Jackie Gaskin* presents Monty Calhoun with a Rat Skat Paddle for orchestrating the upcoming Varner Reunion. If it wasn't for Monty I doubt if the reunion would be happening.
Today a bunch of us ex-Varner Drive-In clientele met for lunch at The Varsity. It was sort of warm-up before a big game kind of event. Awards were given out and Varsity hotdogs and onion rings were gobbled down.
This is my third time I have been to the Varsity in the past six days. I think I could become a permanent fixture there, like maybe a door-stop.
The Varner Reunion will be this coming Saturday, April the 25th, from 2pm to midnight.
If you went to Marietta High School in the 50s I will just about guarantee you will see someone you know… however, it might be a bully who picked on you and took your lunch money. Maybe you are bigger than he is now, if so, pay back time!
Probably 15 or 16 showed up at the Varsity for today’s meeting. Some I haven’t seen in over 50 years. Time does strange things to facial features doesn’t it? After you talk to them a while their old facial characteristics materialized and you forget you are talking to an old man (and the other person likewise). But some of them hardly changed visually at all.
I told the story of Chipper Newport before. I’ll tell it again. In high school he was invited to join the Rat Skats club. His father got wind of it, took his car keys, packed his suitcase and sent him to Tennessee to live with his grandfather. He never did get to join the Rat Skats. Today he was made a member, of the Rat Skats and got his ass paddled, in a soft honorary fashion. He seemed happy to have accepted membership.
When not handing awards we mingled with each other and talked about our common friends, in a positive way, and brought out some humorous things that we got away with then. We were comfortable with each other, even though in come cases there was as much as a 50 year interruption between sentences….. It was Varner’s revived.
We were not the Bowery Boys that hung out in the back of Louie’s. We sat on car hoods and leaned against car doors at Varners and did our socializing.
We learned from each other how to keep the bullshit flowing.
*Jackie Gaskin's mother made my wife Anna's wedding dress. Small world.
4 comments:
It must be fun for you to see all your old buddies when you go there.
Judy,
Yes indeed.
Where will the reunion be held, Eddie?
Chris,
At Horace Orr's American Legion Post on Gresham Avenue, which is at the end of Washington Avenue, which is one block from Roswell Road in the front and one one block from the Boston Homes in the back.
Date and time: April 25th, 4:00pm to midnight.
Cost: $15 for single, $20 for couples.
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