My Spaceship

This train engine was built by Glover Machine Works that was located in south Marietta. My grandfather worked there, my father worked there before my time, and I played there.

On Glover Street there was an old blind man named Charley and his sister that lived in an old unpainted shack behind Glover Machinery. When I was eight or nine years old on Sundays sometimes I would drop by and visit Charley and talk to him about my dad and his brothers growing up. He knew them all and remembered their antics. I wish I had retained what he told me.

Then I would leave Charley’s house and walk by their outhouse, which they had a clothesline going to the outhouse. It had two purposes: to hang clothes and to be a hand guide to lead Charley to the privy.

Behind the outhouse was a patch of woods. On the other side of the woods was a high cement or brick wall. And on the other side of the wall was the backyard of Glover Machine Works. In the middle of the yard was the above train engine. Then, it was not black; it was rust red-brown.

At the time I have seen Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon Saturday morning serials, not to mention a comicbook animal character, a rabbit like Roger Rabbit, I think, that had a spaceship.

On Sundays mid-afternoon I was climb aboard my spaceship and fly from one trouble spot in the galaxy to another and have hand to hand combat with the most hideous evil creatures that one could imagine. I always won. Good triumphed over evil again.

Lookie!!! I Am On the Front Page of the Paper Today!

Yep, there I am on the front page of The Marietta Daily Journal today.

You will have to click on the picture to make it big enough to look at.

That is me sitting on Smiley Burnette aka Frog Millhouse. That picture wasn't taken yesterday. It was taken probably about 61 years ago.

Also the picture on the left with the guy sitting on a bail of cotton. That is Anna's great-grandfather Marion Prance that Anna's mother Marie donated to the preserving of Cobb Photographs cause.

Eat More Watermelon! Everything Flows Better!

That is me above eating watermelon while my older sister looks on. Below is Anna’s brothers, grandparents, and great grandparents eating watermelon.

Lately, we have been eating watermelon just about everyday, and just about everyday I have been regular.

The days I didn’t eat watermelon, the day afterwards it wasn’t so easy on the throne.

Now I know why more people die in January. January is long past watermelon season

Big Wheel Keeps Rolling

The little tyke here is me. I look like the kind of kid that would be found playing around the rubble of a bombed building in Europe in WWII picking valuables off corpses.

The lady beside me is Ruby, a neighbor. My family and I lived in the Clay Homes and Ruby lived across the street behind a neighborhood store her husband Pete owned.

Pete was 25 years older than Ruby. Pete was also a proud member of the KKK.

Ruby was Pete’s second wife. Pete’s first wife died. He had one daughter from his first marriage and he and Ruby had two daughters. The first wife’s daughter had a son named Tommy that I ran around with from that point until he parted for the Navy after graduation.

Although Tommy lives in town we have not ran into each other since he departed for the Navy in 1960. When his mother-in-law died I went to the funeral hoping to see him and his wife Linda and maybe talk old times. But that very day, before the funeral he and Linda had a blow-up of a fight and they both wanted a divorce. Neither went to the funeral.

Life just keeps rolling along.

Long Long Time Ago

That is me being held by my Daddy the policeman and my sister standing.

We lived in a housing project in Marietta called the Clay Homes. I look about 2 or 3 years old in the picture. I was born in 1941, so that must have been about 1943 or 1944, about the time I started smoking.