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BB Battles

I couldn’t go home because there was a quarter inch high lump on my forehead where I had been hit with a BB. It wasn’t an accident. We shot at each other playing war, Brother Dave, me, and our new friends in town.

[After Dad was forced to sell the farm we moved to an apartment in Gadsden, AL, in December, 1951, when I was nine years old, and lived there a year and a half before moving to Charlotte.]

Sometimes we fought in the woods next to the apartments, sometimes we fought in an old barn and horse stalls across the street. That’s where we had been playing that day, pretending we were fighting house to house. I had been hit in the head at point blank range.

The Red Rider lever action gun were cooler but we thought the pumps were more powerful. This is a 1951 advertisement.
The Red Ryder lever action guns were cooler but we thought the pumps were more powerful. This is a 1951 advertisement.

Brother Dave and I had our own BB guns, bought with money from our paper routes, but we couldn’t take them home. We hid them in the barn across the street because we knew Dad wouldn’t let us have BB guns, much less let us shoot at each other.

Lucky for me he was late coming home again that night. I waited as long as I could before I went home myself, to give the swelling time to go down some. When I came in, I waved to Mother, said I didn’t feel good, went directly upstairs to my room, got in bed, and stayed there.

It worked. They never found out about the BB battles.

Postscript: We finally quit shooting at each other after a BB hit one of my friends in the soft, meaty place between his eye and nose. No real harm done, but it scared all of us.

Coming Friday: You Parked Where?!

Mmmmm, Good Lettuce

My second Mother, Vergie Mae Winn Stith, grew up in Cullman, Alabama, a little town with a population of 2,130 in 1910. When she was a young girl, she told me her mother would send her to buy vegetables from a neighbor, two German sisters who had a big garden.

[My first mother died of colon cancer in June 1947, when I was five.  Dad remarried 20 months later, on Feb. 24, 1949. Vergie Winn, that was her maiden name, was his third wife, or fourth, I’m not sure. She was a 48-year old widow with no children.  My second Mother told me that her previous husband, Leonard Gunn, was killed when a horse he was trying to hitch up kicked him in the head. He died in 1935.]

It might even have been as pretty at this lettuce.
It might even have been as pretty at this lettuce.

Anyway, all the vegetables were beautiful, Mother told me, especially the lettuce.

One day Mother said she asked the German sisters how they grew such beautiful lettuce, what was their secret?

“Oh, vee pour zee chamber pot on zem,” one of the sisters said.

Postscript: The two sisters lost a good customer that day.

Coming Monday: BB Battles