Rum

 Presbyterian College was much different that Anderson College.  One thing in particular was the availability of alcohol on campus.  If we had been caught drinking on campus at Anderson, it would have been grounds for expulsion.  Or at the very least, suspension.  Anderson was a Baptist school.  Students were paranoid.  The city of Anderson was dry which meant no legal bars in town.  Even when we ordered wine in Rome on our AC college trip, we had to be careful not to breathe on anyone.  

 The first thing I smelled, when I walked into the dorm at PC, was beer.  The school was far more lax about that.  One could drink in the dorms, but they didn't let you have alcohol in the classrooms.  At least, as far as they knew.  I had a class after lunch called Voice & Diction.  It was taught by my Drama teacher.  He was a great director, but he could be boring sometimes as a teacher.  The one thing they let us do was to bring cokes into the class after lunch.  Somebody got the idea to add a little rum to the cokes.  At the time, rum was my liquor of choice.  Even though this was not my idea, I have to say it helped get through a boring class.  Those of us who did this laughed at all of our teacher's jokes.  Even when they weren't funny.  We were drunk.  He never knew that he wasn't funny.  We just laughed.  

 I can't say I learned a lot in that class.  Except for maybe Diphthongs.  And, how not to slur words.  If anyone is a teacher and lets students bring sodas or water into class, you might want to check the containers.  Just a thought.

Jury

  I have been called for Jury Duty twice.  I believe that it is one's civic duty to serve on a jury, even if the pay is terrible.  It can also be incredibly boring to sit on a jury and listen to things that you had rather not.  They really should prescribe caffeine in hunks to be on jury duty.  Especially, if an attorney wants to ask the same question of a witness 50 times to see if they will tell something different than the first 49 times.  

 The first case I was on involved a man who fell out of a tree with a chainsaw and broke both legs.  He was suing his neighbor, because his neighbor's small son was holding a rope which was tied to the tree to help steady it.  In turn, the man with the chainsaw could work without the tree moving.  Well, a gust of wind came up which caused the boy to struggle with the rope.  The man lost his footing and fell to the ground.  We saw very gross pictures of a surgical procedure on the man's legs along with pins and rods in his bones.  Because the child was a minor, his father was the one being sued for letting his son hold the rope.  I felt sorry for both parties, and especially for the bad blood these neighbors would have as long as they lived next door to one another.  After the attorneys did their summations, we retired to the jury room to deliberate.  When we got back behind the closed door, we started laughing.  How could a man sue for damages, when he was up a tree with a chainsaw and expecting a 9-year-old boy to keep him from falling?  And, the neighbor couldn't control a windy day.  So, we were ready to find in favor of the neighbor and his son.  Just as we were ready to deliver our verdict, we got word that the two parties had agreed on a settlement.  They shook hands and called it a day.

 The second case I served on was about a man charged with speeding through Five Points and driving drunk.  The police had observed a man driving 60mph.  When the officer stopped the car, he smelled beer on the driver's breath.  The officer asked the man to do a breathalyzer test, but the man refused citing his constitutional right to privacy.  A passenger in the car was also caught urinating behind a business, when the police car rolled up on them.  The man said he had been to a bar with a friend.  He knew he would be the designated driver, so he had non-alcoholic beer.  He was driving fast, because his friend needed to find a bathroom, and he didn't want him to go in his car.  It made perfect sense.  Who hadn't been in that situation before?  We believed the driver and found him Not Guilty.  Another issue about this case was that the I had been to school with the Prosecutor.  When the judge asked if anyone knew a party in the case, I raised my hand.  The Prosecutor and Defense  both said I was okay to be on the jury.  I think my friend thought I would find for him and not the defendant.  Sorry, Bob.  

 And then, there's this.  After the trial was over, I was talking to a co-worker about the case.  He had a side job of working as a bouncer in the bar, where this guy said he was.  My friend told me that the bar didn't serve non-alcoholic beer.  The defendant had lied.  Had the prosecution looked into that fact, the defendant would have been found guilty.  Oh well.  Sorry, Bob.

Fake

  My brother is almost 8 years older than me.  When I was in elementary school, he went to college at Furman University.  By the time I got to junior high, he was about to graduate.  I got hold of one of his college id's and made a fake id for me.  I cut out a picture of me and taped it over his picture.  Why did I need a fake id?  Because I liked movies.

 I wasn't old enough to get into R rated movies, much less foreign films at the Art Cinema.  Those foreign films showed nudity, which was attractive for a guy going through puberty like me.  Swedish films were the best, although French and German ones were good too.  The R rated films appealed to me mostly for the violence.  Many of them also had sex.  

 Most of the time, I would just flash the id to the box office girl.  She would see "Furman" and would let me in.  Once, I thought I was busted.  I was going to see an "art" film, and the box office girl saw my name (brother's name) and said she knew my mother.  She taught the girl in Sunday School.  The girl let me in, but I never heard anything from my mother.  I guess she didn't tell her.

 There were two times that the id didn't work.  Both were when older men were selling the tickets.  The first was at a theater, where I wanted to see a Frank Sinatra detective movie rated R.  He wouldn't let me in.  I saw the film on TV a few years later.  It was rated R for language.  The other time was at a theater downtown showing the film "Fanny Hill" which was a Swedish "Art" film.  No one under 18 could see it.  I showed the guy at the box office my fake id.  He wanted to see my draft card.  Of course, I didn't have a draft card, because I wasn't 18.  I told him that I left it at home.  He then said that it was the law to keep it on my person at all times, so he didn't let me in.  On a side note, the soundtrack music for "Fanny Hill" sounded remarkably like the music for "Star Wars" which came out later.  I can't say that John Williams copied the music, but it is uncanny how similar the themes are.

 I continued to use my fake id into college, so I could drink liquor at clubs.  When I turned 21, I no longer needed a fake id.  It was kind of anticlimactic to go into a liquor store and not have to use a fake id anymore.  Those were more innocent times.  I don't think my brother ever knew I was using his id.  If he did, he didn't tell on me.  

Feet

  When you're a kid, you do some things that one would think twice before doing as an adult.  Case in point--going barefoot without knowing what was underneath your feet.  Even though I didn't get stung, I have been very close in the ocean to jellyfish.  I have stepped on bees before and gotten stung.  I am very allergic to bee stings.  My Uncle Jim was so allergic that two stings would have killed him.  I did get stung on my hand once which swelled up like a catcher's mitt.  I had to put my swollen hand in ice while watching TV.  That wasn't fun.

 But, back to the feet.  My first encounter was with broken glass in the nearby creek.  I was wading through the knee-deep water one Saturday and felt some pain.  I jumped up and landed on more broken glass.  Apparently, someone had thrown a bottle from a car which hit a rock and broke.  I got the joy of stepping on it.  It cut my right foot in several places.  Blood was all in the water.  It is a good thing there were no sharks in this creek.  I stumbled out of the water and back onto dry land to get tennis shoes.  I struggled to put them on and hobbled back home.  My mother told me of the dangers of it getting infected, so I got stung again with the iodine.  I have a few scars on the bottom of my foot from the glass.  Word to the wise--don't throw glass into a creek.  Some kid might get cut up.

 A year later, I was invited over to my friend Beth's house.  She had a Slip and Slide set up in her backyard, and several of the neighborhood kids went over there.  We were going to have fun.  I watched the other kids slide, some on their backs and some on their fronts.  It looked like the ones on their fronts would slide farther than the ones on their backs.  I opted for the front.  Just off to the side of the wet plastic was a rock in the ground.  I hit the rock with the top of my foot but didn't think much about it.  I went again and hit the same rock.  This time, it tore a gash on the top side of my right foot.  I scream in pain.  Beth called her mother to come out and tend to me.  Iodine seemed to be the choice once again.  She took me home.  My mother impressed on me the need to wear shoes.  I still have a scar on the top of my foot.  Every time I look at it, I think of Beth who has passed away.  A reminder of friendship.

 

Carolling

  Our youth group at Kilbourne Park Baptist Church had so much fun.  From the skiing to the camps to the lake to the painting to the car wash and so much more, it was just fun every day we were together.  One of the main things we did was Youth Choir.  We had a wide range of singers from soloists to those who couldn't carry a tune.  All were accepted in our choir.  We were accused by some of being in a clique, but I just had fun.

 One Christmas, our choir director thought it would be good if we would go one night to sing carols in neighborhoods around the area.  We knew most of the songs already, and we learned a few more.  There were a lot of choirs in the community doing the same thing as us, so it felt like we were all blanketing the city with Christmas spirit.

 We went to one neighborhood off of Forest Drive and went walking along the street, stopping at houses to bring cheer to those living there.  We went into a yard and began singing.  A man yelled at us to get off of his grass.  Definitely a Scrooge.  Some of us either didn't hear him, or ignored him, and kept on singing our happy songs.  The man then brought out a shotgun and said that we had to get off of his lawn, or he would shoot us.  We politely ran out of his yard.  

 It was time to get some hot chocolate back at the church.  That was our excuse.  I'm sure some of my friends had to change their pants.  

Swamp

  As mentioned previously, our neighborhood kids were a little mischievous.  It was time to move on to something bigger.  Our parents had bought us walkie-talkies to play with.  We used them to play war in the backyard.  They worked off of a frequency, and the range was about 500 yards.  We didn't need it that far, but they gave us options.  

 One thing we noticed early on was that we could pick up pilots in planes talking to one another and to airports.  It was interesting to hear these people talk about where they were going.  Of course, we devised a plan.  We put together a scenario that our small plane had crashed in the Wateree Swamp between Columbia and Sumter, and we needed help.  It was the first "play" that I wrote.  

 The story went that our plane had crashed into the swamp.  Everybody had died except for us kids.  My friend Bruce played a kid on the walkie-talkie using it as the plane's radio.  His sister Patty was the screamer yelling "help".  I was the director.  As Patty was in the background screaming, Bruce was yelling "Mayday".  Most of the play was improvised.  Bruce said that our plane had gone down in a swamp between Columbia and Sumter, but he didn't know where exactly.  Patty was "bleeding" and needed help.  I chimed in that there were snakes and alligators around.  

 One plane responded and said that he was sending help.  That night on the news, there was a report that a plane had crashed in the swamp with deaths on board.  The Civil Air Patrol had been out searching for the plane but found nothing. They decided it was a hoax. This was before GPS, so they never found out it was us.  We got scared after that, and we broke the walkie-talkies.  That was 55 years ago, more or less.  I am sorry for any problems we caused, but boy was it fun.  

Boiling

  My neighborhood friends, growing up, were great to be around.  We loved playing army in the backyard.  The neighbors behind us had a treehouse.  That was fun just to hangout, until it rotted and fell down.  We would get into trouble, just like kids would do, but we had fun doing it.  I liked to go to the house behind us, because both parents worked.  We could get into trouble, and their parents wouldn't find out.  If they did, they would get yelled at by their father who was in the military.  I could hear him yelling at them with their windows shut.  I was usually an instigator, and others would carry out my ideas.  It worked well.

 One morning, we didn't have school and were bored.  I was over at their house, and we decided to play phone pranks.  We were in elementary school.  We started out with the familiar stuff like calling random numbers and asking if their refrigerator was running.  That was fun, until we called a military base by accident.  They threatened to call the police, so we moved onto other things.

 We had a plan.  We would call a random number and pretend we were the phone company.  We needed to test their phone line.  I was doing the calling, because my voice was a little deeper than the other kids.  A woman answered the phone.  (I'll call her Mrs. Smith)  The conversation went something like this:

 Me:  Mrs. Smith?  This is the telephone company.  We have had reports of a problem with your phone.  

 Mrs. Smith:  You have?  I think everything is okay with it.

 Me:  Do you mind helping us over the phone to check it?

 Mrs. Smith:  All right.  What would you like me to do?

 Me:  Can you unscrew the receiver and tap on the metal plate inside it?  (I could hear some unscrewing of plastic and a tapping sound)  That's fine, Mrs. Smith, but it does sound like there is some dirt in your phone.  Are you in the kitchen?

 Mrs. Smith:  Yes, I am.  I am making some tea.

 Me:  Is the water boiling?

 Mrs. Smith:  Yes, it is.

 Me:  Okay, Mrs. Smith.  I'm going to need for you to drop the receiver in the boiling water to clean out your phone.

 (Mrs. Smith sounded hesitant):  Well, okay, if you think it will help.

 Me:  It will.

We heard a crackling noise, and then her phone went dead.  I hope she got a new phone.  We never called back.