Piedmont

  My father was leading a Sunday School conference at a Baptist Assembly in Kentucky.  He asked me if I wanted to go with him.  I was around 10 years old.  I said yes, because it would be my first airplane ride.  

 We left from Asheville, NC to Louisville, KY., and we were flying on Piedmont Airlines.  This plane was not exactly the nicest plane, but I didn't know any better.  Between Asheville and Louisville, we landed at every airstrip along the way.  Some were in the middle of nowhere with mountains on either side.  When we finally got to Louisville, it had been snowing and drifts were up to my waist.

 We spent a few days at the conference and then went back on Piedmont to Asheville.  This time, it was at night.  I don't know if the pilot knew where he was going or just wanted to have fun, but we banked very sharply through the mountains.  So much so that the flight attendants were having trouble standing up. We also stopped at every runway between the two cities. They served a meal going back which consisted of green roast beef.  I didn't eat it because of safety concerns.

 Thankfully, we made it back to Asheville in one piece.  My first flight was kind of scary.  Normally, that experience would put one off from flying anymore.  I have flown many times since then with very few mishaps.  I would just rather not have had a daredevil for a pilot that night.

Red

  I have had to fly to different places many times.  Despite my familiarity with flying, I am a bit of a nervous passenger.  I learned in Europe to chew gum on taking off and landing.  It helps with the change in air pressure.  I have also learned to drink a soda during the flight to help with my stomach, or to take some Pepto-Bismol tablets before the flight.  I have only gotten sick on two flights.  One was flying between London and Rome, and the other was from Columbia to Nashville.  Most of the time, I like sitting by the window.  It is interesting looking out of the window and hopefully not seeing an engine on fire.

 When I lived in Fort Worth, I had two ways to get home for a visit.  One was to drive, which usually took almost three days.  Back then, my car was not the most comfortable way to go, and I had to stop when my back started hurting.  The other way was to fly.  As I was working at Sanger-Harris, I might get one day off for Christmas, and I wanted to fly home to be with my parents.  If I could work it out and get another day off, that was when I flew home.  I wasn't making a great deal of money, so I found that taking the "red eye" flight to Atlanta and then to Columbia made sense.  It was cheaper than a day flight.  

 Flying at night was much calmer for me, since I could look out of the window and see the lights of homes and businesses.  On one occasion, we got into Atlanta a little late.  We had to circle due to storms in the area.  There was even discussion about landing in Birmingham, but the pilot did get us down to Atlanta.  By the time we arrived, the flight to Columbia was going to leave sooner than I had planned.  Had we arrived on time in Atlanta, I would have had a longer time to wait for the departure to Columbia.  As it turned out, I was running through the terminal to get to the right gate.  It was sort of like that old TV commercial of OJ Simpson running through the airport and jumping over luggage on the floor.  I made it to the gate with just seconds to spare.

 The flight from Atlanta to Columbia was a bit scary.  I could look out of the window and see lightning in the distance, and it was a bit bumpy.  It was raining, when we reached Columbia.  The pilot landed the plane halfway down the runway and jammed on the brakes.  When we finally stopped, everybody clapped.  We weren't clapping, because we landed.  We were clapping, because we were lucky to be alive.  

 I am sorry that my parents had to come out to meet me early in the morning, when it was still dark, but sometimes saving money outweighs the inconvenience.  At least, the engine didn't catch on fire, or I don't think it did.  It was dark.

Cobbtown

  There are a lot of small towns, where the residents are suspicious of outsiders.  It shouldn't be that way, but it is just a fact of life.  One such place is Cobbtown, GA., population around 300.  So, everybody knows everybody else in that town.  It is located not too far from Savannah, and usually strangers don't stop to visit it.  That is until one Saturday morning.

 My friend, Del Bazemore, had relatives buried in a church cemetery in Cobbtown.  We had left Atlanta that morning and decided to take a detour to let Del visit with his ancestors in the graveyard.  Chris Sanders was driving.  It wasn't hard finding the church, as there weren't many around.  We walked around looking for the graves and found who Del wanted to see.  As we were paying our respects, a police car pulled up.  The officer got out and asked us what we were doing.  We explained why we were there.  At the time, Del and Chris had longer hair than me, so we were afraid that the cliche question would come out of the policeman's mouth:  "You boys aren't from around here, ere y'all?".  Well, we weren't disappointed, but then his next words were:  "Why don't y'all come to my house for lunch?".  We didn't know if we were being arrested for trespassing, but we knew we had to accept his invitation, so we followed the police car to the officer's home.  He lived with his mother, and she fixed us a nice meal.  We found out that he was the only officer in the town.  

 After we finished eating, he guided us to the outskirts of town and showed us the road we needed to take to get back to South Carolina.  When we got to another small town in South Carolina called North, Chris was slowing down as per the speed limit signs.  He saw 35mph.  All of a sudden, a police car was behind us with his siren on.  Chris pulled to the side, and the car pulled up behind him.  We knew he wasn't speeding, but the officer told him that the speed limit was 25mph.  Chris told him that he didn't see that sign, so the officer pointed it out to him.  It was on the side of a building behind a tree.  Can we say, "speed trap"?  The fine was $150.  Chris took a picture of the so-called sign and went to court.  The judge knocked the fine down to half and no points.  Some small townspeople can be nice, like Cobbtown.  Some not so much, like North.  By the way, North is twice as big as Cobbtown, and half as nice.

Pranks

  There is something in my nature about pulling pranks on others, especially if they are an unknowing participant.  For someone to not know that I am putting them on can be very funny for me, although some people have no sense of humor.  I have found that some people take things too seriously, which in itself is funny to me.  Take for example a few things I have already written about, such as the woman who burned up her phone, because I told her to put her phone in boiling water.  Or all the people we made phony phone calls to, when I was in college.  Or the time us kids in the neighborhood created a fake story about a plane crash in the swamp.  Or the time I called the White House and wanted to make an appointment for Strom Thurmond with the President. Or the made-up teacher I was going to marry during the pandemic.  The list goes on.

 A couple of others come to mind.  When I went to the movie premiere in Greenville, SC of "The Midnight Man" with a couple of friends, I saw myself in the movie dancing away in Lamar's in Clemson.  40 feet high on the screen.  After the movie was over, some folks wanted to get autographs from the stars who attended, namely Cameron Mitchell.  So, I devised a plan.  I would go into the men's restroom after the movie, and one of my friends would pretend to be a stranger wanting my autograph and would ask for it, while I was in the restroom.  I stopped what I was doing and gave him my autograph.  The others in the restroom asked me if I was anybody.  I said yes and walked out.  I loved seeing the reactions on their faces.  I wonder if someone told their wife that they were at the next urinal to a movie star.  That would have been priceless.  I did have a friend who told me years later that he was once at the next urinal to Gregg Allman in a restroom at the beach.  He wanted an autograph, but Gregg said that he wanted to finish first.

 The other time was at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport.  My two seminary friends and I went out there to play a couple of jokes on unsuspecting people.  I was walking in a terminal.  One friend was pretending to take pictures of me with his camera.  The other was trying to get an autograph from me.  The stares we got from others in the terminal were priceless.  There was a lot of people pointing at me and wondering who I was.  My friend with the camera stopped me and pretended to be a reporter asking me questions about why I had come to the Dallas area.  As many real celebrities do, I just shrugged him off and continued walking.  On another occasion at the airport, we went into a restaurant there and looked for a man sitting alone at a table.  We sat at a table close enough for him to hear our conversation.  We talked about hitting it big in Las Vegas and making millions of dollars.  Of course, we really hadn't done that, but we wanted to see his reaction.  At first, he sat there quietly, but you could tell he was listening to us.  When we mentioned the jackpot that we had won, he started leaning into our conversation.  He never made eye contact with us, but we could tell he was envious of our "winnings".

 Life is worth living, when you can laugh at others' reactions to things.  I would have loved to work on "Candid Camera" back in the day.  The point is try not to take things so seriously all the time.  And, never lose your inner child. 

DFW

  I have a confession to make.  I love trains, whether big or small.  I just love the clackity-clack of the rails.  The first train ride that I remember was when I was around 3. We went on the train from New Orleans to Ft. Worth.  My father warned me about something that I never forgot.  Don't stick your arm out of the window.  It might get chopped off.  He also warned me about my head for the same reason.  Since I was 3, that was a horrifying thought.  I never tested his theory.

 When I got to Columbia, our elementary school class took the train from Camden, SC to Columbia on a field trip.  That was pretty cool.  I also rode on the Tweetsie Railroad in the mountains of North Carolina.  It was like a touristy thing, but fun as a kid.  My father reminded me again about no arms or head out of the window.  I thought of blood, so I passed.  Then, there was the train ride between Lucerne and Paris that was a bit traumatic.  I had to protect the girls on our tour from persistent Portuguese soldiers.  It was pretty scary.  It was the only train ride I have had, where we were in our own roomette.  I wish that the lock on the door worked, but I am glad that the conductor came by to clear the soldiers away.  Check out an earlier story called "The Train".

 Checking out Fort Worth, when I was attending seminary, there were two trains of interest.  One was in Forest Park.  It was a miniature train mainly for kids.  It went across a bridge with a warning not to be on the bridge when it crossed.  I did that once.  There wasn't enough room for me and the train.  I ran like fire to get across the bridge before the train.  One day, my friend Sonny and I went on the train.  We were sitting behind some Japanese tourists.  Their friends were on the side taking pictures of these folks, as the train passed by.  We had some fun by covering our faces with our hands, as their friends took pictures of them and us.  I wonder, when they got home and developed their film, if they thought we were criminals.  "Sumimasen" (sorry in Japanese).

 The other train was at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.  It carried passengers from one terminal to another for free.  If you went there at night, very few people were on the train, so one could just ride around the airport.   It even went up a hill and down another like a slow-moving roller coaster.   John Renfrow, Doug Bryan and I would ride it.  They were friends from seminary.  If it was free, then we were going to do it.  Free and fun.

 I also took Amtrak from Florence, SC to Washington, DC for a transit meeting with another friend, Charles Gossett.  I covered that in an earlier story.  As I said, I love to ride on trains.  Hearing that whistle blow.  Nothing like it.