Month: April 2018

The Pipe

The man my Dad had challenged to a fight — I don’t know his name, I’ll call him The Fighter — was a semi-professional.

John F. Stith Sr., during his Army days
John F. Stith Sr., around 1920, during his Army days

Both men were in the Army and Dad was, in effect, his promoter, lining up fights, placing wagers, and collecting when The Fighter won, as he almost always did.

One evening, going somewhere on a train, The Fighter said something ugly about a woman my father was escorting. That was the kind of thing he could not, would not, tolerate.

When the train rolled to a stop Dad saw a pipe on the embankment beside the tracks and he told The Fighter, Let’s settle this right now, or words to that effect. The pipe would give my Dad a distinct advantage — when he had no chance in a fair fight, he didn’t fight fair.

They got off the train and The Fighter began taking off his Army jacket. Dad walked over to the embankment and grabbed hold of the pipe with which he intended to teach The Fighter a lesson he would not soon forget.

To his dismay, however, the pipe wasn’t lying on the ground, it was sticking out of the ground, and he couldn’t pull it free.

Dad said he spent several days in a hospital, recovering from the beating he took.

Coming Friday: The Love Of My Life

Living Life NOW

Henry Woodhead, my partner on three canoe trips down the section three of the Chattooga River, told me this story, about the night he and his wife sat around talking about how much they would like to go to Mexico, a trip that seemed out of the question.

For one thing, they didn’t have any money.  For another they had a small baby.  And besides that, he was a school teacher with a contract to teach a full year.  Impossible!

Lets go!
Lets go!

But the more they talked the more they wanted to go until, by golly, they decided they would go to Mexico, the next day.

He and his wife solved the money problem by selling their refrigerator, that night, to a friend for $75.

Henry quit his job, just called up his principal on the telephone and resigned. The principal told him that if he went off to Mexico, if he didn’t honor his contract, he’d never teach again anywhere. But that didn’t matter to Henry, at least, not right then.

This is what their VW bus looked like.
This is a VW bus like Henry’s.

Next morning they drove to South Carolina, left their child with his wife’s mother, and lit out for Mexico.  Henry told me they spent two lovely weeks there. They slept in their VW bus, used their cash to buy food, and paid for gas with a credit card. When they were almost out of money they headed back to South Carolina, picked up their child, and return to their apartment in Gastonia, N.C.

When Henry got back home he didn’t have a job or money.  Or a refrigerator.

He couldn’t teach any more so he started looking for other work and that’s how he got to be a newspaperman, out of desperation. The Gastonia Gazette, hired him to write features — it turned out that Henry had a way with words, a gift.

For weeks, until Henry and his wife could save up enough to buy another refrigerator, he told me he went to the ice house every couple of days and bought a block of ice for their ice chest, to keep the baby’s milk cool.

After working a while at The Gazette he got a better job writing features for The Charlotte News, where I met him.  And then onward and upward, to a reporting job in the Big City, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Henry and his wife had lived life now, and had come out smelling like a rose.

Coming Monday: The Pipe