Pre-Varner Reunion April 2009

click on the above to see the faces better

Pre  Varner Reunion Business in Burlington's parking lot, which is the site of where Varner's Drive-In was.    

James Kirk, Late Bill Rampley, Marvin Shaw,  Steve Tolbert, Harry Hanson,  Charles Waters, James Caudell, and Neal Lawrence.

Pre Varner Reunion 2009

March 2009 Pre Varner Reunion business in the  Burlington parking lot. 

Left to right:  Pat McPherson,  Ray Denard, and Charley Waters.

SUNDAY FUNNIES!! Fabulous Furry Freak Bros by Gilbert Shelton

I think THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS( or is it THE FRIGGING FURRY FABULOUS FREAK BROTHERS?) cartoon speaks for itself, it needs no introduction.  The creator, Gilbert Shelton,  also is responsible for WONDER WART HOG (so don't blame me).

By the way the three brothers are not related.

click on the cartoon to make them readable.

TUBA SKINNY Grand Opening of La Music Factory

The Louisiana Music Factory has had Tuba Skinny music available (download or CDs by mail) since the Get-go.  Apparently they moved into a new place and Tuba Skinny performed at their grand opening.  This is in their 2014 section of youtube.

Take it way TS!

Patricia Whiten

Patricia Whiten at the 2009 Pre-Varner Reunion.  Patricia died in January 2012

Tommy and I Finally Smoked a Peace Pipe, sort of

Recycled:


We first met at a high school football game. We were in the 7th grade, our last year of grammar school. My friends and I would go to the football game to hang out. We had no real interest in the game.

Beside the cement seats on one side was a grassy bank. That was a hangout for 7th graders – high school wannabee students. At that time there were about 4 or 5 grammar schools in Marietta. And maybe of all those schools maybe each school had four or five 7th grade unauthorized representatives. There might have been as many as 25 7th graders on that bank, and all but your close friends from your own school were potential enemies.

That is what Tommy and I viewed each other as at first: potential enemies. It didn’t help that we got in some kind of scuffle and rolled down the hill trying to punch each other.

After about the second or third summit on the grassy hill it was understood we each came to face off…. But much of it was dares and dirty looks at each other.

The next year when all us ex-7th graders met under the one roof of the Junior High School I found out Tommy’s family was one of the most known families in Marietta - his father owned the Chevrolet dealership.  

We continued snarling at each other, showing each other that each was not afraid. We had several pushing contests, which might equal to young male goats butting heads… but we knew when to stop and not get hurt or get into trouble.

Through the eight and ninth grades Tommy continues to be an asshole every time we passed in the hall way.

Tommy had two siblings, two twins a boy and a girl. I got along great with the girl. The boy twin was sort of timid and an introvert… so, we hardly ever got to know each other.

After Tommy turned 16 his father got him a 56 Chevrolet, green and white. I remember one time hitchhiking and he came by and slowed down like he was going to give me a ride and shot me a bird. That is one boy that held a grudge.

This animosity continued throughout our high school years. We never got close.

His father was a very gracious hard working man. One night during our Valentine’s Banquet, because it was snowing, I slid into a ditch. Tommy’s father materialized and he and a black man worked for an hour or so to get back on the pavement and then drove away before I could thank him property. That was his thing on snowy nights, is to ride around and give help to stalled and stuck autos.

Hardly anybody liked Tommy. They thought he was a snobbish asshole – what do I mean, “thought”?

I think his father had a heart to heart talk with him and told him if he wanted to hold his family position as one of Marietta finest elite he had to get in and do a little mischief with the locals…. The next couple of levels down in the caste system…. Show them you are one of them… go with them to tip a few cows over or something…. Win their respect.

One night Tommy was at the drive-in we hung out at. He was right in the middle of everything. He acted like we were best friends.
Recycled from  a post on Chicken-fat in 2006:


One conversation led to another and before a few of us, including Tommy was making plans to hijack some watermelons off a watermelon truck. Back then there were no Interstate expressways. On federal and state highways with traffic lights and all. The Chattahoochee River separated Cobb County from Atlanta. On each side of the Chattahoochee was a huge hill. The US 41 Highway, coming out of Atlanta had to climb that steep hill. We have noticed that these loaded down flatbed trucks with watermelons could barely make it up the hill. Also, half way of the hill, was a driveway, going off to someone’s summer home overlooking the Chattahoochee.

The plan was for us to park in the drive way with the lights out. With the truck came struggling by we would simply pull out of the drive way, get behind the truck and a couple of us run along between the truck and the car and pull watermelons off and hand them off to who was in the car.

Tommy was to be one of the watermelon relayers. The planned failed. The driver must have looked in his rearview mirror. He stopped and jumped out with a iron pipe ready to defend his watermelons.

Which scared us, we outside scattered and the car fled like a scalded cat.

But the most important thing is that Tommy bonded with us.



Last year he died, it was rumored he died after being in a coma for a year "after that gun incident.”

Varner Pre-Reunion 2009

I heard there will not be a Varner Reunion this year.    We had good times at the previous reunions seeing old friends we grew up with.

I am going to relive in pictures in the upcoming days  of the Varner Reunions.  The first one was the pre-reunion.  A meeting of us thugs to reinforce our friendship and make plans,  It was held about this time of the year in 2009.  

A Day At the Georgia Aquarium , 2008 (recycling my pictures)

Prying Similar Names Apart

I heard on the news the other night that the county has decided to change the  names of a lot of streets with similar names.  They said it could cost lives if the ambulances and/or fire trucks and/or policemen go the wrong street that was called in.

Duh!  Do you think?

Back in the 1990s in Cobb County and Marietta there were two roads named Tower Road.  One of the Tower Roads went by the hospital and the other Tower Road was about eight or nine miles away, off Pete Shaw Road.

There is an assistant living on Tower Road  one block from the hospital.  The name of  the assistant living is Atherton Place, and if my Postal memory is correct, it is  on 111 Tower Road.   Tower Road near downtown and beside the hospital had three digit numbers.  The Tower Road  eight miles away had four digit numbers.  That Tower Road number range was in the 4000s.

One night somebody called 911 because someone was having a heart attack on Tower Road and they gave them the number.  It was a 3 digit number, which in this case was at Atherton Place Assistant Living.   The ambulance went to the Tower Road eight miles away and couldn't find the address.  The person at Atherton Place died. 

The officials then decided to  form a group to check all the streets for duplicate or similar names so this kind of incident would not happen again.   The first thing they was to change the Tower Road eight miles away to Indian Town Road.   

For over a year a few people made up of Postal and  local government  employees combed the names of the streets to  remedy name confusion.

A lot of street names were changed.

In subdivisions sometimes almost every street has a similar name, maybe they all start with Arbor Forest or Rocky Falls and then have Circle, Court,  Drive, Place, etc.... That reminds me did you know there are over 200 streets in Atlanta that have Peachtree in the name?

Why is the county doing it again?   What did they learn from the last time? 

Rogers Ferry and Buck = Buck Rogers?

This is Rogers Ferry crossing over the Chattahoochee River, about 1890.   They are probably coming from Atlanta's side to the Roswell side.  On board with his two mules and wagon is William Cinatra "Buck" Jones (1850 - 1930). 

Buck, a farmer,  was a resident of the Cumming-Alpharetta (Milton), Georgia, area.  He was married to Sarah Ann Elizabeth "Sallie" Brown (1848 - 1920).  They were/are Anna's  great great grandparents, on her mother's mother side.

The Whites, Gallengers, and the Neighbors

Speaking of the White Family of Boone County, West Virginia. (what?  you don't read my Facebook posts?), brings up the Jerry Springer types, which bring up my neighbors across the street.  

They use their front yard as a stage and I think they know they have us as an audience.   They speak in loud booming voices as if they are on a stage; as the daughter said to us once, "We are loud people."  Every time they do put on a show, which might be a knock-down-drag out which more than a few times has involved 911, the cops, fire trucks, and  ambulances.   Each time a "show" starts happening we take our places:  I get at one window, Anna gets at another window, the 92 year old lady that lives next to us gets in her window, and the neighbor that lives on the other side of them gets on the other side of the hedge and we all get on the phone and describes the action from different angles.

It is almost as good as the cable TV serial SHAMLESS.    I much rather see SHAMELESS because it is fiction - it did not really happen.  Or did it?  The things that happens on that show are too bizarre that a mere mortal could make up.

For instance on the past Sunday night show  the so-called head of the Gallenger family is dying with a bad liver.  He is sinking fast and already looks dead.  He needs a liver transplant but they  are not high on the list to get one and besides they do not have the money they need.  Through a friend of a friend they find a doctor with an Arabic accent.  He refuses to give his real name because his medical license is not  recognized in the U.S. to he has to perform operations illegally.  Normally, he is a taxi driver.  He demands 30 grand and the family can only come up with  $26,000 - he thinks for a minute and accepts the money.  He advises them that after he finished the job and leaves they should call 911 and then he will be rushed to the hospital to be taken care of, post op- care.  He operates, they call 911 and he is rushed to the hospital  The family went to the hospital and the examining doctor said he did not have a liver transplant, but they did take one of his kidneys, so now, that put him head of the list.   On the same show a thug that lives close by has a Russian Whore for a wife and he is her pimp; he was reminisces  the times in school he was a total terror to kids with lunch money and how he would nearly beat them to death and put them in the hospital, and he almost got a tear in his eyes and said, "God!  I miss my school days!" 

New Word PROLETARIAT

New Word:  PROLETARIAT.  I learned a new word today.  Of all places I learned this new word from the pages of MAD comicbook, of all places,  letters to the editor.  The letter said MAD used to appear to the intellectuals but now, they have cheapened themselves to appear to the PROLETARIANT.    I  looked up PROLERIANT and read that PROLETARIAT is the  working masses.  The working class; the hourly  wage worker; the people that live from payday to payday.  Or as some of the wealthiest and politicians call the "96%" (with their nose in the air).

Glenda Bradford Moon Died

In the Marietta Daily Journal's today's Obituaries it was reported that Glenda Bradford Moon, age 69, died Friday.  Her funeral is to be at the Marietta First Baptist Church at 11 A.M., Wednesday.

I remember Glenda well in high school.  I saw her at her at her mother's viewing a few years ago and I don't think she  remembered me.  I think she was a very gracious person. 

SUNDAY FUNNIES!! LI'L ABNER B & W Sunday Funnies

click on image to make it readable.

LI'L ABNER Sunday Funnies by Al Capp.

Roswell Mill Women Recycled

A friend of mine, Harvey Scott,  who lived in Marietta years ago asked me to do a blog about the Roswell Women Mill Workers.  Well, I am all for recycling if it means getting out of some work.  I mean, why do something that I have already done?  This is an Chicken-fat article I made on December 11, 2006: 




Speaking of old mills of the mid 19th century, in nearby Roswell, Georgia, was the Roswell Mill.

Roswell Mill was owned by the founder of Roswell, Georgia, Roswell King. He was a New Englander, Connecticut, I think. Roswell was looking for a good spot to have a mill near a good river and selected an area on the north bank of the Chattahoochee River in Cobb County.* And in an area where he could probably get cheap labor. Thus, he founded Roswell. And he invited his family members and good friends to become the city’s first elite** of the town.

When Sherman began his swath of destruction through Georgia his men were destroying mills in their path, unless they were foreign owned – then they would honor them as not Southern owned, therefore, they got to stay in business. Roswell King made a Frenchman temporarily president and of Roswell Mills. When Sherman’s officers were inspecting the mills they were making Confederate uniforms and other items to aid the Confederate war effort.

The 400 or so Roswell Mill Workers, mostly women were arrested as traitors and sent to northern states to work in the mills.

The picture above, Adeline Bagley, is a distant relative of Anna who was a Roswell Mill worker. She lived 1825-1910. It is a sad war story. Adeline was arrested in 1864 by Sherman’s men and transported with hundreds other to Chicago to work in a mill or factory. At the time her husband Pvt. J. Buice was in the war.  When he returned, he waited for years, then assumed she had died, remarried. She returned, on foot, in 1869. Her husband already had a family. As far as I know she spent the rest of her life alone. War is Hell.


*Now Roswell, Georgia, is no longer in Cobb County. It has been re-mapped to be in Fulton County.
** One elite family in town produced Martha Bulloch, who was the mother of President Theodore Roosevelt.

TUBA SKINNY PLAYS SHORT DRESS GAL

Smyrna Crazy City Limits in the 1960s.

Harold Smith

Last night we went to the Marietta Museum of History to hear Mr. Harold Smith speak about the history of Smyrna.  Mrs. Smith knows just about everything about Smyrna, Georgia, and has plenty of true little humorous stories to complement  the history facts.

Harold has written three books about the History of Smyrna.  One is an Arcadia Book (the beige local history books)

It was a good talk. 

One of the the slide show presentations was a map of Smyrna of years ago,  The map has a very strange shape.  It has long arms and fingers and little islands.  By islands I mean there were little neighborhoods not  part of Smyrna but was completely surrounded by Smyrna..  The residents of these  sections could not leave their non-Smyrna area to go any place without going into Smyrna.  The same was true for the arms and the fingers city limits borders.   Harold didn't mention the reason for the strange city limit borders, but I will.

The reason it was like that  was  because the islands and between the fingers were black neighborhoods.    I  remember in the late 1960s the politicians bragged that they did not have any black residents. 

That was something they thought was something to be proud of, to have a lily white city.  Give me a break. 

This Is For You Thelma!

My sister-in-law, Thelma grew up in  Florida.    She still  goes  to there every winter and fish for months.

This year is a little different from previous times because this year she has a electronic device like an ipad or something that she can read and get emails and surf the net.  However,  to be able to do her emails,  surf the Internet, and of course read the latest Chicken-fat.com she visits the library  to get on their Y-Fi.  or sometimes to the parking lot at a nearby McDonald's. 

This below is for you Thelma, so you won't get lonely.  Enjoy!

The Prance family one day in the 1980s:

Tony Hester Died

Mr & Tony Hester camping at Boy Scout camp

I found out today my childhood friend Tony Hester died Saturday,  March 15, 2014.  I lived on Manget Street and he lived around the corner of  Glover Street.    We were very close friends.  Daily, one of us would ask the other "where are we going?"  or "What are we going to do today?"

I knew the way around  his grandfather's big farm in Smyrna almost as well as he did.  Seeing each other daily we had our run-ins and fights, but we being mad at each other lasted  usually less than an hour.

We played together from about the 2nd grade until the 8th grade.  Then his family bought a small farm in Kennesaw and after that we went to different schools and lost our closeness.    We went our separate ways.  Tony's father, Claude, had  a well productive garden, chickens and, a hog, and the family had an outhouse.  

When Tony grew up he went to work at Lockheed, got married, and had at least three children.  I read that in his obituary today.  I went to his mother's funeral home  visitation a couple years ago and he wasn't there,  he just left, but his two sisters and his uncle who I knew well, were there so I got to see them and recall our times.  His uncle worked with my father and lived at the base of Blackjack Mountain.  

Tony's  obituary listed his  two sisters' names, which brought back one memory in particular:

Behind Tony's yard, in an unused part of Larry Bell Park was some tall skinny trees that lined a gully.  Being the show-off that I was at that stage in my life, I told Tony and other friends playing with us that I could climb to the top of one tree and swing over to the other one, and then climb down on the tree I just swung over to.  I knew I could do it, because I  had done  it before,  when playing in the tree alone.   I climbed the small tree and at the top I started swinging.  I expect the tree to do like it did last time and lean way over to the other tree, where I would grab around it and let  lose my grip with my legs and be totally in the top of the new tree.  It did not work like that.  I got the tree swinging and top, with me in it, snapped off.  I fell a high distance and it knocked me out.  I was unconscious. 

Tony and others thought I was trying to fool them, that I was really just lying there with my eyes closed to see what they would do.  They told me to quit fooling around and get up. I just lied there.

They threatened that if I didn't get up they were going to take my clothes off and get Tony's two sisters to come  see me naked. 

They took off my clothes.  Tony got his wagon,  they put me in it and pulled me down to his house where his two sisters were playing in the back yard. Then they realized I was really knocked out or dead.

They pulled me in the wagon to my house.  Nobody was home.  We didn't lock doors back then.  They lugged me to my bed and left me.

I don't remember what my parents said when they came home.   I think I woke up about the time they starting having a fit, so I don't think they carried me to the doctor or the hospital or anything.

Ironically, my uncle W.C. Hunter did the same thing in his youth, swing at the top of a tree and latch onto a new tree and .... the treetop broke with him too, however he was unconscious for many months. 

OK is Like OKay

On  Sunday Morning CBS News Program they had an article about  the word OK; okay?

I did not know it but OK or Okay is one of the few words, if not the only word that is universally understood.  They told the originals of the word, and how it's meaning spread world-wide which, to me, went in one ear and out the other .  I have a retention problem.

HOWEVER!  It did bring back a memory.  Kay Jewelers  opened up a store in downtown Marietta at the corner of Atlanta Street and South Park Square, where Reynolds and Ferrell Drug Store was.  

Kay Jewelers was one of the first jewelry stores that  I noticed that retailed more than just jewelry.  They   had all kinds of affordable gadgets.  Their advertising slogan was, "Its OK to OWE KAY."  And to pout their money where their mouth is they gave all the graduating seniors of 1960 a Kay credit OK (they didn't have credit cards back then).

I took advantage of their offer and bought me an Royal  or Underwood manual typewriter they had displayed in their window.

I think about once a week I would drop by their store and make a payment.   

It was my first leap into its "OK to owe your Soul to the company store. "

Petty Family in Varnell, Georgia, 1949

click on image to enlarge

My Petty family  (mother's side) in about 1949*, in Varnell, Georgia:  1st Row L to R:  LaVonn Petty (daugh of Leonard);  MaryBeth Petty (daugh of Wallice, Wallace's arms around her, she died in 2008); Georgianne Petty Grant (died  1966); Cecil Grant (died 1958) (husb of Georgianne); Osmo Petty (died 1978);  and Eddie Hunter (me - son of Janie Petty Hunter).

2nd Row:  Jeannette Phillips Petty holding son Billy (wife of Leonard) died  2004);  Leonard Petty (died 2001); Wallace Petty (died 2007); Thelma Cox Petty (died 1994); Anthony Rollins being held by his mother Opal Petty (died 1992); Janie Petty Hunter (died  1996); Viola Ridley Petty (the grandmother, mother, brother,  or mother law) (died 1968); and Frances Hunter(daugh of Janie Petty Hunter),  Frances arms around  Harriet and Rhonda Petty (daughters of Wallace Petty).

3rd Row:   Mary Jo Johns  Petty(died  2000), wife of Tom Petty;  Tom Petty (died  1979); Walt Ridley (died 1953), brother to Viola Ridley Petty:  Ed Hunter (died 1988), husband of Janie Petty Hunter;  Roy Petty (died 2000); and Sara Petty (not yet McLemore) (died 1999).

*based on a baby in the picture that was born December, 1948.  That would make me age 8 in the picture.

HAPPY SAINT PATRICK'S DAY!!

Go easy on the grog.

SUNDAY FUNNIES!! MAD's GOPO 'POSSOM

This is from MAD #23, which was the last issue of MAD comics, but not the last issue of MAD.  MAD #24 continued on in magazine format, which we will eventually see.

This was drawn by artist Wally Wood and written by MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman.   I don't think Harvey Kurtzman cared much for Walt Kelly, the creator of POGO.  He said he once applied for a job as an illustrator for newspaper and Kelly was the one that hired and he gave him the bum rush.   Well, pay back time!

Click on each panel to enlarge them to make them readable.