A Letter from Bubba

three-room school

I got a letter from Bubba the other day. Bubba, as you know, is my old friend from my boyhood and high school days.  I don't see Bubba much anymore. The distance between us is more than a few miles. However, I do hear from him occasionally.  He hasn't joined the digital age, yet so I hear from him by way of the U.S. Postal Service. I recently received a letter from him that  I thought I would share.

Dear Tony,
You know Jimbo Dillashaw died a few days ago.  Me and Darlene went to the funeral.  It was a good funeral.  Preacher Johnson said some mighty good things about old Jimbo. I hope some of  'em was true. It got me to thinkin' 'bout that time back in school when me and Jimbo went to that church.  I b'lieve we were in 'bout the sixth grade. (Course you know we got held back a coupla times.) You remember that little three roomed country school doncha? 'Member Susie Chesnut? She was that new girl with the pretty red hair. She was cuter than a brown speckled puppy. Well...me and Jimbo wanted to get to know her a little  better. You know how it was when you first started noticing that girls was different. I went home and asked Mama if she knew anything about her.  Mama said that she thought the family had come from down about Modoc somewhere. Said she thought they had moved in that little house behind old man Johnson's place. She thought maybe they was sharecroppin' with old man Johnson. Mama said they wont Baptists like us or Methodists like Uncle Ted's bunch but went to some little church called New Hope or New Life or new something.  Well, sir! Right then and there I got me a idea! Maybe if me and Jimbo went to her church it would impress her. Mama said she guessed it'd be alright; after all we would be in church on Sunday.  But remember that we was just Baptists visiting.

Come Sunday I was all slicked up. I had shined my Sunday shoes and put on my suit pants.  I had outgrown the coat, and the pants were a little short, but I pulled 'em down kinda low. I had on a clean white shirt that was a little small.  The top button wouldn't button, but when I put on one of Daddy's neckties you couldn't tell it. Took me nearly half an hour to tie that tie, and I never did get the ends even. I slicked my hair down with some of Daddy's Wildroot Cream Oil.  Even got the cowlick to lay down.  Yessir! I was lookin' mighty good! I stopped by Jimbo's house and he joined me.  He had cleaned up a bit, but  he didn't look near as good as me. (Something he had to learn to live with.) I 'spect it was a good two mile walk to the church on that beautiful spring day. We talked about music we had heard on the radio the night before.  We were big fans of the disc jockey, John Orr, from Nashville, Tennessee. It was what they called rhythm and blues. Mama and Daddy called it the devil's music and didn't like us to listen to it.

We got to the church.  The sign said "New Life Gospel Fellowship".  Me and Jimbo went right in and sat on the back pew like the good Baptists we were. I looked up at the front of the church and they had a band.  The band started playing and people were singing. That git-tar picker was nearly as good as Chuck Berry.  He could make that git-tar almost talk.  We don't have git-tar pickers at the Baptist church. That preacher was a live wire. Didn't have on a suit coat and he had the sleeves on his white shirt rolled up. He was readin' from the King James version of the Bible. (Mama says that's the only real Bible.) He kinda yelled and hollered and told how bad we was and how we was going to hell if we didn't change. (I had heard all that at the Baptist church so that wasn't nothin' new.) Now the people jumped up and down and  said "Amen" a lot.  We don't jump up and down and say "Amen" in the Baptist church. After a while that preacher kinda calmed down and then he started speaking in a real soft voice.  And he said, "Now is the time in our service when we show the power of our beliefs." He looked over to

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the side at two men in brand new  Red Camel overalls and motioned for them to come forward.  Then he looked to the back of the church and said, "Would you two boys join me at the alter." It was not a question.  I looked at Jimbo and he looked at me and we slowly left our seats and went down the aisle. I noticed Susie Chesnut, girl of my dreams, out of the corner of my eye.  She wont smilin'. After we got down to the front, the preacher set us down on the very front row. He was only six feet in front of us. The two fellas the preacher had motioned to had brought two little cages forward. They was only about a foot square. Well, sir, the preacher reached inside one and pulled out the biggest rattlesnake I had ever seen. The thing wrapped around his arm as he held it high. Its fangs looked to be two inches long and its forked tongue  was a flickin' back and forth. That snakes tail was a shakin' and that rattlin' sound was sendin' shivers up my backbone.  I know my mouth was wide open and my eyes musta looked like they was gonna pop right out! The preacher still had that King James Bible in his right hand and he said,"In the  book of Mark chapter 16, verse 18 hit says, 'They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them;'" And he looked straight at us and he said, "Now, boys, do you believe?"

I stuttered and said, "P-p-preacher, I dunno. But I b'lieve in that door back behind you."
He looked down as me and said sympathetically, "Son, there an't no door behind me."
I quickly answered," Well, where do you want one!"

Me an' Jimbo didn't waste no time getting home. I 'spect we set the world record for the two mile run. Didn't think much about Susie Chesnut  any more.

I'll write agin later,
Your ole buddy,
Bubba.

About Books

published 1952

I like books.  I always have. There is something magical about them. They can take you places you can only dream about. From them you can gain knowledge you wouldn't have known otherwise. And, of course, there is the pure entertainment value. I'm not sure which I prefer. When I was very small, I remember my mother reading to me at bedtime. My first book that was my very own was The Boy Mechanic. It was a Christmas gift from an aunt and uncle. It seemed to be thick and heavy for a six-year-old. At six I was not a very good reader, but it had a lot of pictures. After all, I had built my first model airplane at five from the book, and it flew. I remember it well, a red and white Piper Cub. The balsa wood was printed in color. I enjoyed this book for many years. I still have it. It taught me how to do things from building small electric motors to taxidermy.

Somewhere in my youth I discovered the Hardy Boys Mysteries. Great entertainment  and I continue to read detective novels today. While in elementary school my parents bought a set of encyclopedias from a traveling salesman. I read each volume.  It took some time but by then I had become a fast reader. Yes, I was one of those kids who took a flashlight under the covers at night to read. I continue to love books.

There is a lot of stuff to learn from books.  A friend of mine was once repairing his MGBGT and told me that "If someone's done something they've probably written a book about it.  You just need to find that book!"  While I was in the Navy I read a lot while at sea.  In the ET gang we had a book locker filled with dog-eared paperbacks. (I don't consider paperbacks real books.) To check out a book you had to deposit two new books. And yes I do have a collection of Library Cards. Do book-of-the-month clubs still exist? My sister once was a member.

Where did books come from?  I'm sure the cavemen did not have them. But first: what is a book?

A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book. 

That is the Wikipedia definition. It did not happen overnight.  The book evolved.  First there were cave drawings.  Probably the need to make these drawings portable led to reproducing them on something smaller than a cave wall. As written languages developed so did the method for preserving what was written. Some of these first methods could have been as simple as notches cut on a stick in a certain order to represent words. Clay tablets were preceded by wooden tablets, palm leaves, and silk cloth as a substrate for writing. After clay tablets came the papyrus scrolls and vellum scrolls. Papyrus was made famous by the Egyptians for their hieroglyphics or pictograph writing. The book could have evolved several ways.  According to some it may have been the offspring of the Roman tablet.  The Romans used a tablet roughly 8 x 10 inches with a

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wax coating. With a pointed stylus  it could be written on. The writing could be removed  by smoothing the wax. Some speculate that several of these tablets bound on one edge became the first book.   The concertina or accordion theory also exists. A scroll could be folded concertina style forming a book.  If the pages were cut apart and one edge bound  a reasonable facsimile of the modern book would be produced. As the change from scroll to codex was made the material changed for papyrus to vellum. By the 4th century scrolls were no longer produced. A codex is bound pages of a handwritten manuscript.  Vellum is calf or sheep skin. There are a number of advantages of the book versus the scroll. A book fits on a  bookshelf better. A book offers random access to its content and is more durable. It lies flat for easier reading. Books have followed roughly the same form for over 1500 years. They have:

• separated words  
• punctuation
• numbered pages
• tables of contents
• indexes
• capitalization

Paper replaced vellum.  When papermaking was mechanised in Spain in the 11th century, book production expanded rapidly. We saw some of the water-powered papermaking machinery in a museum in Italy. Another rapid expansion in book production occurred with the invention of movable type by Gutenberg. The Protestant Reformation fueled the demand for printed Bibles and other printed books. I have been fortunate enough to have seen one of the eleven surviving Gutenberg Bibles at the Huntington Museum in California.

The Boy Mechanic, a repurposed book of collages, a sketchbook, and light reading

Yes, I've had a lifelong love affair with books and see no reason to change.  However, I wish someone would develop an e-book reader with the smell of ink and paper.

Bubba, Fritz and Claus.

"Stop here! I think this is it," I said to Claudette as we were driving along west on Old State Road in Berkeley County, South Carolina. " Over there, on the left," I added.

"What are you talking about?" she said as she braked the Toyota almost to a stop.

"We passed it. Right back there! The POW camp," I exclaimed.

"Oh, you mean where they kept the captured Yankees during the Civil War?" asked she.

"You know to refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression. I think you say "Civil War" just to aggravate me," I responded. A slight smile spread over her lips.  I then added, " It was a prisoner of war camp for Germans in World War Two."

She deftly turned the car around in US Highway  176 and we returned to the sight of the camp.
"The sign says 'Dukes Camp'. I can't believe that was the name of a German P.O.W. camp," she said as we turned into the narrow white sandy road. There were some buildings on the right as we continued our drive.

"That's not the P.O.W. camp, " I said, "There, it's on the left."

We stopped the car and got out. It was a warm day, and the scent of the longleaf pines tickled our noses. Pine straw crunched under our feet as a red-tailed hawk soared overhead. Under the towering pines were three buildings with green roofs and cream colored walls.

"They have sure taken good care of it for the last sixty-eight years," Claudette said.

"MeadWestvaco, the giant packaging company, uses it for some employee training now.  The company has renovated and maintained it, and they changed the name to Dukes Camp," I said. "I liked the name Camp Witherbee better."

"I thought that was the name of a community in the county," said she.

"It is.  There may be a connection to that name for the prison, but I don't know," I added. "There were 240 German prisoners of war housed here between 1941 and 1945."

 "What did they do?" she asked.

"These particular prisoners worked in the forests.  I would think harvesting timber.  Prisoners in different camps did different jobs. Fred, at church, said his daddy used prisoners to pick peaches in Cherokee County, and my brother-in-law's granddaddy used 'em on his farm. You know, almost 400,000 German P.O.W.s were brought to the U.S.A.  Twenty-one camps were right here in South Carolina, and there were 900 nationwide. It seems there was a concentration of camps in the southeast. I think that is probably because skills needed in agriculture are easier taught than industrial skills. The language barrier could be a problem.  Farmers would pay the government $3.50 per day for prisoner labor. The government got the three dollars and the prisoner got the fifty cents. "

"Did any of them ever escape?" She asked.

"Yes, in one instance a POW escaped from a camp in the midwest and blended right into American society.  He didn't reveal himself until sometime in the 1980's," I answered, happy to show off my knowledge.

"I wonder if anyone around here has any German heritage dating from the 1940's?" she mused.

I chose not to comment on her speculation.

"But weren't people afraid with the prisoners so close by?" she asked with a quizzical look on her face.

"Amazingly not.  You have to remember that all able bodied men were off at war. There was a severe labor shortage to cultivate and harvest crops, so the farmers welcomed the German prisoners.  In some cases the farmers' wives would provide lavish dinners for the prisoners on holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas.  German prisoners in this country fared better than anywhere in the world. They had better food and lodgings and, in general,  much better living conditions.  I'm not sure I can understand how they could welcome them with somewhat open arms. These men previously had been killing their husbands, sons, and fathers. When I was researching this bit of history I found out one very disturbing fact of which I am not proud."

"What was that?" she asked then added, "Disturbed you?"

"Yeah, I can be disturbed!"I exclaimed.

"So, what was this disturbing fact?" she wanted to know.

"A few miles from here in Walterboro the Tuskegee airmen were trained. As you know they were  African-American officers in the U.S. Army Air Corps."

"I know. We saw the movie 'Red Tails' with Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr," she added, "We liked it."

"These men and other African-American soldiers were not allowed in white restaurants, but German P.O.W.s were.  That really made no sense to me, and I grew up in the segregated south. You fraternize with the men who are killing your brothers, husbands, or sons, but won't fraternize with the one who is protecting you. Where is the logic in that?"

"Well, as you always say, 'That was just the way it was and the way it had always been.'" she noted.

"But, as Dylan said, 'The Times, They are a Changin'!", I replied.

Later that day we ventured further up the Old State Road into Greenwood County.  While there we had dinner  with my friend Steve. During lunch conversation I mentioned the German P.O.W. camps in South Carolina and the one we had visited.  Steve knew of the one in Greenwood, South Carolina and said that his father had used a prisoner as a laborer for farm work. The German was quite a craftsman and had made small wooden box for his father to give his mother. It exquisitely chip carved and had a clever wooden hinge.

The past is all around us, we have only to look.

Roma, not just a kind of tomato

The Metro was crowded.  Rome has two lines, and one of them terminates at the Coliseum. I thought it was interesting that there is also a Metro line in Madrid that terminates at the bullring. Both are arenas for entertainment. As the crowd emerged from the station into the morning sun the ancient structure was immediately across the street. Like many old buildings or structures it is partially shrouded with scaffolding. Old structures need maintenance, especially if they are major tourist attractions. The crowd, of which we were a part, crossed the street and headed toward the Coliseum with a few going to the right toward the Roman Forum.  We were not looking forward to another crowded attraction.  The lines were long but moved quickly.  I paid at the credit card line, and it seemed to move a little faster. To say that the Coliseum is a massive stone structure seemed to be an understatement. Thousands of tons of carved stone are held together with concrete and iron straps to produce the arena with a seating capacity of 80,000. Construction began in the first century with initial funding coming from the sacking of Jerusalem. In ancient times we would have received a ticket on a pottery shard indicating our seat. Of course there was a hierarchy in seating. We would have probably held tickets for the nosebleed section. The layout of aisles and stairways is extremely efficient. We took the elevator to one of the upper levels and from there could view the interior where the events would have taken place. Recreations of famous battles of land and sea would have taken place here as well as gladiator contests. There were elevators to bring animals and men up to the arena surface. A portion of is is restored  now. As we watched I mentioned to Claudette, "Can you imagine what it was like with the wild animals tearing Christians to shreds?"

"Actually, there is no evidence that  ever happened," she informed me.

"And Nero never doused them with oil and used 'em for torches?" I retorted.

"I don't know about that.  But as a movie fan, you know what I think of?" she asked.

"I'll bet you're going to tell me," I responded.

"That would be Russell Crowe standing there with sword and shield saying, ' My name is Gladiator!'"

The Coliseum also had a canopy originally, but no more. We walked around a bit.  Although there were many  tourists the attraction is so big that very few areas were crowded.

After leaving the Coliseum we walked a few hundred yards to the Roman Forum.  This was the center of the Roman Empire which spread from the British Isles to Turkey and Egypt. Unfortunately, Rome is unlike Roman cities built in conquered lands.  Those cities tend to be well organized, while Rome is rather helter-skelter.  Nowhere is this more evident than at the Forum. There are many ruins here but little open space unlike Ephesus, for instance, with its large open plazas. There are many facades of temples and government buildings. One facade has columns of rare purple marble. This stone was imported from Egypt.  As we walked around the ruins, Claudette said to me, "Let's see the House of the Vestal Virgins."

"Okay," I said, having never heard of a vestal virgin except in Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale and that was back in the sixties. "What's a vestal virgin anyway?"

"Well, let me tell you," she said, as we looked at the ruins of a structure which had been three stories high with a reflection pool surrounded by statues. "The Vestal Virgins were priestesses whose primary duty was to keep the eternal flame in the Temple of Vesta burning. They were selected between the ages of 6 and 10 for duty and were Vestal Virgins for thirty years. Upon keeping their vows they could retire with a pension. If they did not keep their vows they were executed."

"Sounds kinda like nuns," I mused.

"The advent of Christianity dissolved the order  of the Vestal Virgins," she added.
We continued to walk among the ruins, listening to the tour guide we had recorded on our cell phones.  It was very interesting though crowded.

We ate at the restaurant near the Metro station al fresco, of course, before returning to our hotel. It had been an interesting day at two of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

"Arrivederci Roma"

Links: Dino sings about Rome  The greatest sword and sandal movie ever.