Category: Charlotte

Setting Goals

COMING SOON…

Iceman and I completed our hike of the John Muir Trail [Aug. 6-22]  and returned home on Saturday.  Oh, yes! We lost the permit lottery earlier this year but we took a chance and got what they call “walk-up permits.”   I’m going to write about that 200-mile hike soon, just as soon as I recover from reentry to the real world.  When I got home we had no Internet service; our home phone didn’t work; the garage door wouldn’t stay down; the grass needed cutting; the bills needing paying; Donna’s RV at Topsail Beach was leaking; you know, all the usual problems. But soon.  It was a memorable hike.

*  *  *

I was in the 9th grade, playing football at Hawthorne Junior High School in Charlotte, the first time I saw the Central High School Wildcats play the rich boys from across town, the Myers Park Mustangs.

wildcat emblemThe game was played at Memorial Stadium, then the largest stadium in Charlotte, and when the players jogged on to the field fans on both sides –about 10,000 — were on their feet, yelling. Screaming!

I wasn’t all that good at football –too small, too slow– but I vowed that by the time I was a senior I’d be out there. I’d be lining up beside my teammates, facing the ball, hands on my knees pads, ready for the signal to race down the field.

And I was.

I aimed too low.
I aimed too low.

When I was a senior I made the Wildcats’ first team kickoff and receiving teams.  [We had been moved to a new school called Garinger.]  It was a magical year — we won the North Carolina AAAA championship. When we kicked off to Myers Park I was on the field, just as I had vowed. And when the play was over I jogged to the sideline, to our bench, and sat down.

I realized right then, not years and years later — right then — that I had aimed too low.

Coming Friday: Rat Remorse, Part 1 of 3

We Made Peanuts

When Brother Dave turned 16 in 1955 and got his driver’s license he and I bought several dozen vending machines and began selling peanuts in Charlotte. It wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme — we sold a mouthful of peanuts for one penny — but I saw something I’ll never forget and I learned a thing or two.

One of our machines was in a cotton mill and when I went into the mill to service it I saw why mill workers were sometimes referred to, disparagingly, as lintheads.  There were blobs of cotton dust floating in the air, everywhere, so thick you could catch them and put them in your pocket. Cotton dust covered our peanut machine in a thick blanket of white fuzz. It clung to the workers, making them look ghostly.  I didn’t know it then, I don’t guess the mill workers did either, but that cotton dust was killing them, giving them byssinosis — “brown lung disease.”

And I learned some things.

I learned that some so-called regular guys will attack a vending machine if it cheats them out of one penny.

I learned that a thief will destroy an new vending machine to steal a few pennies — take $25 away from you to get 25 cents for himself.

And I learned that some grown men will steal from a kid.

For weeks Dave and I couldn’t understand why one of our machines, in a long-haul truck repair shop, wasn’t making money.  When we came to service it, the peanuts were always gone, or almost gone, but there never seemed to be enough pennies in the money box.  It had to be a malfunction of some sort so, more than once, we switched out the machine, but the problem persisted.

Finally, a fellow who worked there blew the whistle on his co-workers.  He said the key to the trucks’ glove box fit the lock on the peanut machine’s money compartment. They were  unlocking the money compartment and stealing the peanuts by running the same pennies through the machine, over and over.

Coming Monday:  The New Sheriff In Town