Your First Time

They say you always remember your "first time," I am fairly certain they are talking about something other than hearing a good story, but today that is the "first time" I am talking about.  I've heard the following story many times through out my life. Told by different people and set in different places but my first time was in the early '60s. I was a junior or senior at Coosa County High School located in Rockford Alabama. I was sitting in Coach Ashley's American History class. Coach Ashley was a gifted basketball coach. The best way to describe his history teaching is to say that it was adequate for the place and time. Back in the '60s Coosa County had three high schools. The school in Rockford was called Coosa County High, I suppose that was because it was located in the county seat. As I said, Coach Ashley was a gifted basketball coach and in spite of having few talented players to draw from, he accomplished much. During my years as a student in the Coosa County school system I recall at least twice when CCHS made it to the state championship playoff games in Tuscaloosa. I heard this story right after one of those trips to the playoffs.

Coach Ashley came into the classroom and said he wanted to tell us about what happened to him in Tuscaloosa. It was not unusual for Coach Ashley to tell us stories. In fact it was the norm. About the only real American History that we learned was about WWII and that was from his personal experience stories. Anyway, He began to tell us that he was over in Tuscaloosa driving the 51 (he had a 1951 Chevrolet sedan that he always called the 51) down this kind of main street when all of a sudden he heard a terrible bang and the front of the 51 dropped down. He managed to get it stopped and got out an looked and saw that his right front wheel had run off and to make matters worse, the lug nuts were no where to be found. There he was on the side of a busy road in Tuscaloosa, which even then was a city compared to little Rockford, with the right front of his car sitting flat on the shoulder of the road. He didn't know who to call or what to do.

It was about that time that he became aware of someone standing behind him. He looked around and there behind a fence stood a guy grinning like something was very funny. The fence in question surrounded the grounds of the Bryce's mental hospital. The guy looked as if he was just about to break into laughter. Coach Ashley did not see any humor in the situation and asked the guy what was so funny. The guy replied, you don't know what to do, do you? Coach Ashley replied that indeed he was at a loss. This made the guy grin even more. Getting really irritated, Coach said I suppose you know what to do? Of course said the guy.

What you do is go to your trunk, get your bumper jack and jack up the front of your car on the side where the wheel ran off. Then you get your lug wrench, go around to each of the three remaining wheels and take one lug nut off each of them. Put your wheel back on the front of your car and use those three lug nuts to attach it. Then you can drive down to the Western Auto Store and buy you five new lug nuts,  replace the three that you took off your other three wheels and put the remaining two on the wheel that has the three. Coach Ashley stood there a minute, thought about it and said to the guy, you are right, that WILL work. Then he asked, If you know something like that, why are you in there? The guy smiled and replied. I am in here for being crazy, not for being stupid.

When will marijuana become legal in Alabama?

I am now 67 years old. I have lived in Alabama all of my life. We don't have a lottery, probably never will. Lot of folks in this state have an idea that lotteries are bad, you should not gamble and you should do everything in your power to make sure that no one else can either. Some of those same people feel the same way about drinking alcohol. Bad, don't do it, stop others ,etc. Over the years, alcohol has gradually gained a foot hold. Although if you belong to certain cults, y'all know who you are, I won't call you out by name, you still may have to go to the ABC store in an adjacent city to get your libation but you can legally drink.

What about marijuana, where does it fall? Will it be like the lottery and become legal in Alabama when hell freezes over, or will it, like alcohol gradually permeate the heart of Dixie. My prediction is that it will be neither. I predict that marijuana acceptance will come about almost overnight. "When?" you ask. Well that depends on how fast the rest of the country legalizes marijuana. Based on what I see in the news, that will come about at a fairly swift pace. There will be other holdout states, Arkansas, Utah, maybe Oklahoma, but in a handful of years, I suspect that the majority of the states will have legal recreational marijuana and virtually all of the states will have legal medical marijuana. Now don't get me wrong, just because everybody else does it does not mean Alabama will do it. Just like the case with the lottery, Alabama would have no problem being the only state in the US in which marijuana is illegal, but under one scenario legalization can and will happen virtually overnight.

Picture in your mind a date it the not too distant future, marijuana is legal almost everywhere, except for Alabama of course. Things are still going pretty good in the state. We have elected another new Republican governor and legislature. They are attracting the occasional new business from outside the state, our taxes, (property, income and sales) while too high are still below the national average. Our education system is sadly plugging along but thanks to online studies our children are actually getting a better education than ever before. All seems right with the world except over in Tuscaloosa, the UofA has not won a football national championship in 10 years and over in Auburn, AU has finished out the the top 10,  five years in a row. Both schools go into panic mode to determine what is wrong. They hire high paid consultants that leave no stone un-turned to discover the reason for this totally unacceptable state of affair. The consensus opinion of the consultants is  that all of best football players in the country are going to schools in states where marijuana is legal. When this becomes public knowledge, Alabama will legalize marijuana, virtually overnight.

Did You Vote?

I used to work with an old man from Gardendale that never failed to come by my cubicle on election day and ask , did you vote? If it was a primary election I would tell him no. He would  tell me that I needed to go vote and I would explain to him that I did not vote in primary elections because I was neither a democrat nor a republican. He would then ask me, what are you? After the first time he should have known the answer so he was either very forgetful, which I doubt, or was just being an asshole. Anyway, at the time I considered myself to be a libertarian and would tell him so. He would always bristle up and say, we have to have traffic lights. I suppose that was his way of saying that libertarian is just another name for anarchist.

I have been retired a long time and I am fairly certain that the old man has made his way to the beulahland, which I suspect has no traffic lights, but in the intervening time I have learned that we in fact do not have to have traffic lights. Roundabouts work just as well and  have been shown to be safer.

A Suit of Clothes

One of my daddy's favorite stories involved a local merchant in my home town and some surplus clothes.

Back in early nineties, a friend of mine shared with me his tickets to a seminar at the Wynfrey Hotel in Birmingham. The seminar was on a Saturday and I went and spent the day. It was a money making seminar and of course they had lots of books and tapes to sell and I bought some. Of all the things they offered, the information on buying at government auctions and reselling for a profit was what interested me the most.

I brought the books home and studied them and came up with a plan. I got on the mailing list for goverment auctions and attended my first auction at Fort McClellan in Anniston. I bought some ammo cans and a few other items. Along toward the end, they auctioned off and enormous box of army dress green uniforms. When the auctioneer opened the bidding, no one was bidding so I did. I was the only one that did so I got the box of dress greens. I had no idea what I would do with them but that much poly wool blend material just seemed like it was sure to be worth something.

The buttons on the Army dress green coats were gold plated so they had been removed from virtually all of the coats. The pants were intact. When I got home with the lot, I unloaded the dress greens and sorted through them. I found a couple of pairs of pants that fit me and much to the distress of my daughter I started wearing them to work. Those things wore like iron. I tried to dye a pair of them black but that poly wool blend would not take the dye. Eventually the bulk of the dress greens ended up in a storage trailer that my daddy and I had bought on halves several years earlier. There they sat for quite a while.

My daddy was in business for years but by the time I started buying government surplus, he was retired. You could tell that he missed the buying and selling that he had done in the past and he was always coming up with something to satisfy that business itch. One weekend I was down there visiting and he said "what do you think about me taking some of those army clothes up to Bobby's and letting him try to sell them?" Bobby was a guy that I had gone to school with and he ran a store in the town just north of where my parents lived. I told him that was fine with me. I did not think too much more about it but a couple of weeks later I was down there visiting again and my daddy had a story to tell me about Bobby and the clothes.

Before I tell you the story, I have to admit that Bobby loved a joke or funny story as much as, if not more than, my daddy so there could be slight embellishments contained in the story, but here is what my daddy told me.

The Monday after my visit, daddy went down to the trailer and picked out 5 of the dress green coats and 5 pairs of pants and took them up to Bobby who put them in the back of his store. I don't know whether they were hung up or stacked on a table but they were placed back there for sale. Time past, maybe a day or two, and a guy came in and saw them back there. He wanted to know how much they were. Bobby told him it was $2 for a pair of pants, $2 for a coat, or $5 for the suit (the suit in question was of course a pair of pants and a coat). This pricing in itself was funny as hell to my daddy but what was even funnier was that the guy said that he definitely wanted the suit. Bobby told him to go back there and check and see if he could find something that would fit him. The guy sorted through the clothes and indeed did find a coat and a pair of pants that fit him. He paid his 5 dollars and left. After awhile, he returned and told Bobby that the coat didn't have any buttons. Bobby assured him that it had buttons when he bought it and that he must have lost them. I don't know if the guy kept the suit of clothes or if Bobby gave him his money back, or both, but I do know that that story was worth a whole lot more to my daddy than the 5 dollars that guy supposedly paid for his suit of clothes. It was also worth more than I had paid for the whole box of clothes at Anniston.