Category: My Favorites

He Might Be A Redneck

I think my son Mark might be a redneck but you judge.

He ran over a bullfrog with a lawnmower and had frog legs for supper.  Doesn’t that make you a redneck, eating what you kill with a lawnmower?

The eyeball incident is more evidence.

Mark Stith
Mark Stith

Mark was cutting metal without putting on his safety glasses — no need, it was a small job — when a tiny piece of metal flew up and stuck in one of his eyeballs. Mark, eyes wide open, walked to the kitchen, got a magnet off the refrigerator door, and used it to pull the shard out of his eye.

But I think the roofing accident is the clincher.

Mark fell through a rotten roof board and ripped his calf open on a sharp piece of tin. It bled like crazy, so much it occurred to him that he could bleed to death before he got to a doctor.  Somehow he was able to hold his calf together with one hand and still climb off the roof and down the ladder.  And then he stopped the bleeding, drove himself to a doc-in-the-box, and got 30-some stitches.

How did he stop the bleeding?

He’s a Southerner, isn’t he?  He duck taped it.

Postscript: On second thought, that magnet thing isn’t all that bad an idea.

Coming Friday: The Accident, Part 1 of 3
 

 

Quincy The Terrible – Part 2 of 2

Bob Quincy resigned as sports editor of The Charlotte News in 1962 to take a job as sports information director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  I got out of the Navy in the fall of ’62, enrolled at UNC, and worked as his student assistant for three years.

The division of labor went like this: He did stuff like deal with head coaches and produce the football and basketball brochures and I did stuff like mimeograph press releases and take the mail to the post office.

Ehringhaus Dorm
Ehringhaus Dorm

During football season, Bob wrote a column every Monday which I mimeographed, stuffed into envelopes and mailed.

One Monday, after I had worked for him a couple of years, Bob said to me, “You’re going to write the column today.”

All right! Finally!  I thought to myself.  Looks like Mr. Bob Quincy is starting to see the light, starting to figure out just how good I am.  And then I came to my senses and I asked him, “Why aren’t you going to write the column?”

“Because I can’t type,” he said.

“Why can’t you type?”

“Because my hands are too sore.”

I was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery if I could, so I pressed on: “Why are your hands sore?”

The football team had played on the road on Saturday and when it returned to Chapel Hill that evening, Bob said he went over to Ehringhaus Dorm, where most of the players lived, to pick up some things he had left there.

He said he got on the elevator and punched four, but it went to the sixth floor.  He punched four again.  The elevator went to five and then to one.

He punched four.  It went back to five.

“And then I beat the hell out of that elevator,” Bob said.

Postscript: Bob Quincy, a five-time winner of the National Sports Writer of the Year for North Carolina, died of cancer in 1984.  He was posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame in 2005.

Coming Friday: “His First Name was ‘Sir’”