He Went Thataway !

He Went Thataway!

byJim Osburn

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Jim Osburn

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This work is based on actual events, persons, and places. All those elements have been altered, however, so that nothing should be assumed about any events, persons or places not specifically and accurately identified in the text. This work is intended as a approximate description of the anecdotes contained herein, and not as an accurate historical record.

To all of our descendents.

It’s a mad, mad world.

You’ll never understand it

So just relax and enjoy it.

Introduction

Conversations with an empty cookie

Did you ever hear of anybody getting a Chinese fortune cookie that was empty - with no fortune in it?

I did. Twice.

The first time, I figured it was just a fluke. Nobody's perfect - not even Chinese fortune cookie makers.

The second time was a year later, in a different restaurant, while I was telling our dinner companions this incredible story about how I had once got a fortune cookie with no a fortune in it. I opened my cookie and guess what? Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Nobody is going to believe that. I have the curse of Cassandra – I tell the truth but nobody believes it. Of course it is of no great consequence to the world I live in, or to me personally, whether I get a fortune in my cookie or not. I do not believe it was an omen from the Gods that some fateful event was, or was not, going to happen just because I didn't get one of those crummy little slips of paper in my cookie.

On the other hand, a double whammy with a missing fortune is too significant to ignore completely. What am I supposed to believe?

This logic is a bit tricky: I very cleverly deduced that the hidden fortunes must relate to the past, not the future. I would not need a printed slip to tell me what had already been my fortune in the past.

But why an empty cookie? It must relate to a lack of communication. The emptiness of the cookie was saying to me, You have been given a past that was full of pleasure, humor, curiosities, excitement, adventure and lots of other good stuff - and you have not shared this with anyone!

Baloney, I said to the cookie (figuratively, of course. I do not actually talk to cookies.) Everybody has a past. What is so special about mine?

It is not about you, dummy, my cookie said scornfully. You were nothing more than the fly on the wall that happened to live through some wild and wonderful things while you were growing up, growing smarter, and growing old. It is about the people, the places, and the customs you met along the way. You were a midwife to the birth of electronics, the coming of space travel, the explosion of science and all that. You have been to the back alleys of Istanbul, the tents of the Bedouin, the Indian villages of the Andes and even the hallowed halls of Congress. You need to share those things. Not to deal with time like a history book, or with places like a travelogue, but like a curious mind in search of ….. The cookie seemed at a loss for words.

Fulfillment? I suggested.

Yeah! That's it! Fulfillment!

Communication for dummies

So this is an effort to communicate from my generation to others what life was like before their times, and in worlds beyond their horizons. It does not imply that anyone’s experience is any better or any worse than that of anyone else – but there are differences. Major differences.

Native Americans and many other cultures venerate their elders for their wisdom. I’ve concluded that getting older doesn't make you wise - it only makes you wiser than you used to be. The youth that thinks they are inventing a brave new world soon discovers that non-conformists are all alike, and they became what they criticized in the salad days of their youth.

The world seems to get smaller. Pictures and sounds flowing from communications channels give you the delusion of being everywhere, doing everything. But it is not the same. Anything that is not news, not photogenic, not simple sound bites, and not in our language is filtered out. You cannot experience the smells, the breezes, the characters, the ambience or the precedents for things you see on the five o’clock news. The real world can't be transmitted through electronics.

Within these limitations, I believe folks do care about other times and other places. But they don’t want to learn about them from sermons or lectures. So can we really communicate?

We speak different languages - not because the words are different, but because we bring different experiences to the conversation. I could never properly explain how we would get up from the dinner table and run outside to see an airplane fly over just because airplanes were so rare. I have lived in a world where we might go for months without seeing or hearing a single advertisement, but this generation will never know a day when they are not bombarded by hundreds of them. I could never describe how it felt to walk down the street on a hot summer evening and talk to my neighbors. But I could never get any kind of thrill from a rock concert. We speak different languages.

The University of Wisconsin every year publishes for their faculty a list of things that the incoming freshmen cannot be expected to know about. To the older faculty members, it is shocking to realize that events they so well remember are ancient history to their students. Any President prior to Clinton is history. There have always been cell phones, digital cameras, space walks and Frankenfoods.

So can we really communicate? Well, we can try.

The anecdotes and events you will find here are essentially true, gleaned from those collected while wandering through the world with what some have called an attitude of bewildered amusement. Some names and places have been changed to avoid embarrassing anybody or creating a killing field for lawyers. But truth is more interesting than fiction, and I need not apologize for truth that sounds like fantasy.

The common denominator in our communication problem is that most human values apply to every population and every generation. On that I cannot lecture or sermonize or quote statistics. I can only try to illustrate how, in different times, different places and different ways, we lived, loved, fought, played, worked, laughed and cried in our world just as every generation does in theirs.

Maybe that is what my empty cookie was trying to tell me.

We will try to deal with this awesome subject in five parts:

Part One: As the twig is bent…

A depression age country boy managed to become a beekeeper, a bootlegger, a welder, a blacksmith, a watchman, a messenger, and a conscientious objector - all before maturity. Conflicts with the FBI, a missionary, the military, segregation, and bullies of the pecking order in every town. Magic tricks Dad learned while in jail. A nickname that didn’t work, and a pig project that did.

Part Two: A sailor sans ship and sea

Serving on the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the East Coast – but never a moment on a Navy vessel. Swimming in the surf, in dress blues, helping to catch grunion. Pioneering data processing, using low tech to bring justice to bully boatswains. The agony of a wedding that didn’t happen, and the ecstasy of one that did. Life in The Snake Pit. The vanguard of integration. Discharge on a technicality, and remembering Dwayne Marble

Part Three: Learning and earning

Five years of college while working full time job and managing a bookstore, a literary magazine, and a family. Surviving a FBI loyalty probe, a possum’s campaign for President, and a pauper’s trip to the Mardi Gras. Some weird career choices. And so forth.

Part Four: Don’t drink the water

Immersed into dozens of undeveloped countries not as a diplomat, but as a technician. The gender separated tents of an Arab Bedouin wedding. The unintentional ugly American. Toll road collectors and road bandits. A dangerous flight to where women wear rings in their noses. The Pork Knockers of Brazil. Free beer for the hungry. Revolutions and so forth.

Part Five: No time to go to work

Crashing the small town culture after retirement. From an abandoned movie theater to a performing arts center. Politics with Ross Perot and third parties. The people of Munchkin land and the yellow brick road.

Part One: As the twig is bent…

The mountaineer

My mother was the daughter of a blacksmith in the small mountain village of Black Rock, Arkansas. The Starnes clan passed through there in a wagon train on the way to Oklahoma. They camped on the banks of Spring River, before there was any sign of a settlement there. When it came time to leave, my great grandfather couldn’t find his dog.

Y’all go on ahead, he told the others. I’ll find my dog in a day or two and catch up with you. He and his young wife unloaded their goods and made camp along the banks of Spring River.

The dog never came back. Other wagon trains came, and folks who were tired of traveling settled there in what became the town of Black Rock. There, one bright Christmas morn, Dolores Belle Starnes was born. She grew up scarred by the ridicule of her peers, who deliberately mispronounced her middle name and called her Dolores Belly Starnes.

The flatlander

Four miles away, on the other side of Black River, the Osburn clan found some good rich delta land to raise cotton. My grandfather, Henry Osburn, was a farmer and a Baptist preacher. He made me a windmill out of corn shucks and corn stalks. It only worked if you ran real fast, holding it in front of you. Even as a four year old, a windmill didn’t make much sense to me if you had to create your own wind. I didn’t complain, and I thanked him anyhow, because that was what I was taught to do. He died before he could teach me how to make my own windmills.

Henry's son Arthur used to run up the dusty slope in front of their house, behind the very few cars that passed their way, because he liked to smell the fumes from their gasoline motors. He eventually married that young hillbilly girl from across the river.

The wedding

So it was that my flatlander father married my mountaineer mother, and raised three sons. The one in the middle had a girl's name – Jimmie, a name to fight about.

How come you gonna give that baby a girl’s name?

Jimmie is not a girl’s name.

Yes it is. Least you spell it like a girl’s name. J-I-M-M-I-E is what you name a girl!

Oh, well. When he’s big everybody will call him Jim anyhow.

No they won’t. Big boys will pick on him all the time ‘cause he got a name like a girl.

I guess he’ll just have to learn to take care of himself, won’t he!

He did have a problem as a kid. With glasses, blue eyes and blonde curly hair from age 6, he was a natural target for neighborhood bullies. They always assumed he was a sissy, and he always had to prove otherwise.

As an adult, they not only assumed but insisted that his name was really James. Some junk mailers used Jimmie, but it was usually addressed to Miss or Mrs. Jimmie.

Welcome to the depression

The lady who came around to take the information for the birth certificate spelled the surname of both father and son OSBORN. It should have been OSBURN. The odd thing is that nobody noticed the error on the birth certificate until – get this – until 74 years later.

This blessed event occurred in a bedroom of a small, dusty cotton town of Blytheville, Arkansas. Very few babies were born in hospitals unless there was a medical problem. One week after little Jimmie arrived, the stock market collapsed, leading to the greatest depression in American History. People blamed little Jimmie for that, but he always denied responsibility.

The family didn’t lose anything in the depression. We didn’t have anything to lose. Dad made a living by buying, selling and repairing sewing machines. He was usually paid with a chicken or a ham or a bushel of corn or potatoes. We never got rich, but we never went hungry either.

King Cotton

Blytheville was the home of the National Cotton Picking contest. Cotton pickers would start the day by soaking at the pump, fully dressed, to start the evaporation cooling process. Then they would strap an 8 foot long canvas bag over their shoulder and drag it along the rows picking cotton and putting it in the bag. A good picker could bag a hundred pounds in a day, and it takes a lot of cotton to weigh 100 pounds. The bolls you pull the cotton from have sharp points, so it doesn’t take long to reduce your fingertips to hamburger. It was not a good career choice, it did not pay well, and it was not done exclusively by colored folks as Stephen Foster would have you believe. Many an Ozark hillbilly had no other source of income.

Many years later, I was on a bus that took a rest stop next to a farm supply store. They were demonstrating a cotton picking machine, which none of the farmers there had ever seen before.

That thang won’t never work, one groused. Look at all them hulls and stems it leaves in the cotton.

Look at all the cotton it misses. You’d have to have pickers come along behind to get half the crop.

It’d git stuck in the first mud hole it run into.

You can’t feed that thang hay nor beans. It’d cost more to run it than the cotton would be worth.

It was universally agreed among all the farmers that there was absolutely no future for