Number of entries: 5 Number of pages: 1
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| Name: Storie Mooser |
My remembrance described in emails of last week about being at Sandra's house had to be in spring of '55, not '54, because I didn't join the Arkansas National Guard until December of '54. Bill, maybe you'll remember that after my first summer maneuvers at Fort Polk, LA, '55, I told you of the crusty but good natured sergeant in my platoon who'd been a paratrooper in WWII and Korean. Hell, back when I knew him he must've been only in his 30s but to me he seemed old. Maybe for only amusement he and the few other old combat vets he kept company with sort of adopted me as a side kick (maybe it also had to do with the fact that my oldest brother's best friend since childhood was the regular Army administrative non-com with the battalion. That's also how I got to be the Battalion commander's driver, shuttling all over Fort Polk, getting to ride in tanks and other such privileges.) Anyway, it wasn't always comfortable being in the company of these "old farts" because they refused to salute the Guard officers, thinking of them as being only "weekend warriors" playing at soldiering. Hell, everyone of them had been busted down in rank a number of times for similar lack of military etiquette while in the regular service. I had the feeling they kept that frail affiliation with military through Guard membership because complete adjustment back into civilian life just never seemed to fit after their combat experience. Who knows? Sorry I can't remember his name but it was he who answered my question, "How many jumps have you made?" Without a note of special inflection his flat answer was "Thirty seven", but then he gave that slight shrug of shoulders people use to indicate a matter of no significance, saying, "But only eleven were in combat." I was dumb struck of course that someone could toss out such a loaded statement so non-chalantly, like it didn't measure against whatever scale of merit seemed applicable to him. There I was hardly more serious about my uniform and what it might mean than some actor in a grade D war movie for prime time TV and this guy thought eleven jumps in combat hardly rated -- almost an embarrassment. s***!!!!! Back to bikes: I believe I quit riding that Schwinn after the 8th grade. By then it had been stripped down of finders, chain guard and any other "extraneous" flourish in pursuit of the fashionable look of our bicycle riding generation -- mimic as closely as possible the stripped down California hotrod car look. For a while we clothes pinned playing cards so that they'd be flapped by the spokes to create a sound we hoped would approximate that of a motorcycle. I think I mentioned in an earlier email my amazement when Bob Harmon, Bill's older brother, managed to disassemble and reassemble a Bendix brake. Figures that he went to Georgia Tech and his neighbor friend up Wolf Street who did similar things went to MIT. Harmon and I rode all over the south end of Little Rock, usually two to a bike, one or the other of us sitting on the handle bars facing forward, our legs straddling the front wheel, feet perched on the wheel hub nuts by the narrowest sliver of midline shoe sole. Harmon had a Democrat newspaper route that started over on 22nd and Arch. On Sundays the papers were delivered very early, in winter before daylight and in summer just as daylight was awakening the birds. One very cold winter morning I remember in particular: Bill's older brother (destined to be an electrical engineer)has the Harmon boys' bedroom rigged with an outrageous alarm system that came on with flashing lights and a blaring sound like that on a submarine signaling "DIVE" and which probably caused ripples on Fourche River a half mile away. We bundled ourselves against the freezing cold and silently made our way out of the house as though not just th neighborhood but every prison yard in the state hadn't been alerted, got on Bill's bike (me up front) and rode from one street lamp illuminated whole in the darkness to 22nd and Arch St. I remember it so well I believe because that week I'd indulged the ridiculously expensive purchase at Blass Department Store a pair of tuxedo grey suede gloves with rabbit fur lining, $13.75. They were really quite formal gloves, the type one would see well tailored business men wearing with their top coats. But were warm. I let Bill wear them instead of myself because he was steering the bike and his hands would be exposed. I was able to keep my hands in my pockets. I eventually lost the gloves, of course. While riding tandem on two occasions Bill and I had "close encounters" actually, one was touch and go. One October while the Arkansas Live Stock Show was going strong Bill and I were descending that downhill stretch of Roosevelt Road running from Mitchell School to the Show grounds. Bill was up front steering and riding while I was on the seat behind, my legs splayed out in that accustomed way to keep my feet clear of his legs and feet when either peddling or riding the peddles to keep himself above the top tube. I can't remember if Bill at any time applied any brakes but we were doing a pretty mean clip right along the curb. Jus before breaking into an intersection a car just slightly ahead of us started a right turn into our trajectory (it was a trajectory, not a path). We glanced off the right fender of the car, went all the way across the intersection and bounced up and over the curb, glanced off the phone pole on the other side before halting upright. The driver shouted, "Are you alright?" to which Bill answered "Its OK, it happens everyday". On another occasion (summertime, '52) I was steering with Bill riding on the front handlebars. Approaching High Street headed east on W. 28th I spot my girl friend of the time, Pat Fizer, with two of her friends crossing the intersection, all looking dazzlingly alluring in short-shorts exposing their very shapely, sun-tanned, legs. (Pat, an East Side girl, lived in one of those attractive blond brick resident doctors' homes on the grounds of the then nearly new VA Hospital out on E. Roosevelt Road {gone now}). Pat had very, very attractive sun-tanned legs! I mistakenly dismounted before the bike had completely stopped, leaving Bill out of control on the still rolling bike. Bill tried to dismount while keeping hold of the handlebars but he didn't quite clear the front wheel with both legs so ended up astraddle it, resulting in the still spinning front wheel almost burning a friction hole in the crotch of his Tuff-Nut jeans. That damn near ended the Bill Harmon strand of family descendents. I still don't understand how Bill and I have managed to stay such close friends all these years and him not at some time beating the living out of me.
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| Name: Joe Crow |
Mooser: Boren's Bicycle Shop was on Main in LR on the west side between 7th and 8th I think. Gloria Boren, daughter of the owners was at LRCHS a year behind us. I had a Schwinn 3-speed "English bike"- light weight with caliper brakes in 1952; rode it all over town; did "wheelies" and went down a few times; skinned-up but fortunately no serious injuries. I won a similar three-speed Monark "English bike" in some kind of a magazine contest and sold it to Ray Alexander also in 1952. He still has it; I saw it not long ago; needs a clean-up and rejuvenation which he vows to do "soon". Now I have a Cannondale, a Gary Fisher and a couple of Giants which we ride leisurely around LR-nothing like I've heard you do. Our riding group includes- off and on- Lamar Riggs, Tommy Thomas, Bunny Brown(behind us in school), Jim stanley(1954 LRCHS). Terry Watson and Hammond Satterfield say they're going but they haven't been out yet. Joe
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| Name: Storie (Noopy, Moose) Mooser From: Portland, OR |
Oops, that rock arch on the property of the old St. Vincents Infirmary property was at its Southeast corner, not at the northwest corner as I mistakenly wrote. Also, the blue neon signage that was mounted on the arch, tracing its shape, did read "Infirmary", not "Hospital", as Jimmy Martin was kind enough to correct.
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| Name: Storie (Noopy - Moose) Mooser From: Portland, OR |
This is really strange stuff, .....maybe. But then maybe too you guys wake up in hazy, half awake reverie that seems completely random. Yesterday, just as morning light was coming on, into my half conscious mind floated up the nighttime view (as seen from the W. 9th bus headed downtown) of the rock entrance arch at the northwest corner to the old St. Vincents Hospital's property. I guess that to be at about W. 11th & High Street. Tracing the rock arch in illuminated blue was "St. Vincents Hospital", pulsing in that phosphorous, eerie neon glow. The hospital is now long gone, of course, and High Street is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. Even as a kid the bright neon over the arch seemed inconsistent with the hospital's otherwise seemingly under-illuminated hulk, like it was sulking in the shadows, seen mostly only as a silhouette against a backdrop of light scatter from city lights beyond. I guess I remember it so well because on my bus trips downtown before driving age it had become one of a number of particular scenes along the route that my mind used for indexing my bus trip's progress. Another was the illuminated Goldcrest 51 beer sign that stood high up on a steel post at the NE corner of Wright Ave. & High Streets, its hazy glow casting a pale light onto the earthen parking area that was the setback between the sign's post at the intersection corner and the tavern it heralded, a night spot for the local Blacks, just west and down the hill from the old Dunbar Negro High School. Tethered to these scenes (in a reel that switched back and forward like my mind was attempting to reorient itself to its own "ON STAR" coordinances based upon ancient landmarks) I then get view of the old city transit system lot and barns that occupied that full city block on the east side of High Street but south of the St. Vincents Hospital by a block or two. They were always over illuminated, much like a prison yard, standing in visually screeching contrast to the darkness that brooded over the hospital. My mind then bounced to the glimpse gotten of the nighttime outline of the huge Immanuel Baptist Church that set west beyond the hospital. Then, in whatever mysterious way my mind sees connection between these scenes, I'm presented with the oft times witnessed long-ago scene of the old Oak Forest route bus chugging very slowly in low gear up the 21st Street hill from High Street, having picked up the transferred passengers from the southbound W. 9lth bus after school. I can't recall the number of that bus, was it #8, or 18, or 21,.....what? They were the oldest, smallest and slowest buses of the city bus fleet and I never understood why that route got them instead of other routes. And for whatever reason, the transit authority saw fit to have those oldest busses on this route painted a different color from the rest of the fleet; a deep, dark green colored lower half topped off with pale white on the upper. Was it because it served so much of the Black and blue collar part of town? All I knew is that Sandra Hendley, Jo Lynn Hill, Betty Bernard and Jean Flake were riders of it, daily transferring between it and the W. 9th for their commute to West Side Jr. High. Everyday on my bus ride to school I anxiously awaited them to horridly climb onto the W. 9th bus, all gabbing and giggly, clutching their books and satchels close in front of them over their bosoms, purses strung off bent elbows as they made their way back to seats or to where ever other Westsiders were clustered on the bus. The old Oak Forest bus chugging away toward town. Then, after school, a reverse; my bus window would glide passed after they'd gotten off at W. 21st Street to make the transfer, me craning my neck to keep them in sight as long as I could. Now,......can you imagine parents today allowing their daughter of early teenage to take that commute, transferring at that same spot?
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| Name: Storie (Noopy, Moose) Mooser From: Portland, OR |
Remember the “vegetable men” that circulated through our neighborhoods during the growing season that ran from late April all the way through October? The one that routed through my neighborhood was typical; a local farmer who at the end of each day’s route would return back to his farm on the city’s outskirt to hand pick the crop he’d grown himself for sell fresh to our mothers the following day. “Our vegetable man”, as we referred to him, might well have been the one who served your neighborhood. On our street he came twice a week to park midway in the block, signaling his arrival there with a signature horn tattoo. The housewives would pour out of the houses to assemble around his truck, have him bag and weigh whatever vegetables they chose for the evening meal, but otherwise seemed glad to have the occasion to catch one another up on whatever was the gossip or recipe of the week. He was very polite, thirty-something, nicely built and an otherwise attractive man, always fastidiously clean down to his finger nails. His bib overalls -- of that twill of alternating vertical narrow lines of white and denim blue cotton -- seemed clean almost to the point gleaming. In later years I couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t attempting to polish the image of farmers, hoping to counter the stereotypes that had been so crudely popularized in comic strips. I had the idea that by each day’s end his coveralls were badly soiled with the evening harvesting, so now remember him respectfully for what must have been a very conscientious effort to present himself before his customers as no less worthy of respect than any banker in town. Sorry, but I don’t recall ever knowing his name other than as the “vegetable man”. I do know that the produce of crops he didn’t actually grow himself he purchased each morning at the farmers’ market that was over on the east side of Little Rock at the time, somewhere out near the airport. I’m intimate with this because my older brother’s wife was daughter of a “vegetable man”. Married in 1947, my brother even himself became a vegetable man for a couple of years, running a route over in southwest Little Rock, in and about the Oak Forest development. Once while accompanying him on his route I chanced to get to wave at Sandra Hendley and Betty Bernard who lived in that neighborhood. The days I accompanied my brother on his route we’d be at the farmers’ market before daylight and already the place was hectic with local farmers unloading and selling their produce. Long before most citizens were awakening the market’s business day was over, with all the farmers either off back to their farms to gather the crop for the market’s next day or off to run their “vegetable man” routes. Their days were hard and long. This all came back to me on reading a book that Judy’s “women’s book club” elected to read, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” by Barbara Kingsolver. Having heard all the excitement about it as a best seller and how much trouble Judy had in securing a copy I bothered to read the cover leaf. I’m glad I did. Unlike what I’d expected – a wistful novel about angst in exurbia America – it is one family’s account of “their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it”. In the author’s own words. “…adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.” This is a book for our children and grandchildren. Why? Because it is about us! That’s right, if you want to give your posterity a picture of what life was like for our generation you can’t skip telling them how different was what we ate compared to what they get today – and how they’re worse off for it. This book is not only a joy to read for the beauty of her prose in its telling, but Kingsolver gives us a critical examination of what has happened to food since we had it so good in our day; back when what arrived at our markets and on our dishes wasn’t grown 2,000 miles away but instead was local, was fresh, was mostly “heritage” crops (not GMO or hybridized for long freighting), and was essentially organic – neither a chemical or feed lot product. Your children and grandchildren need to know that not only are their foods loaded with toxins and have been altered out of balance with our species’ nutritional needs, but that what is essential as nutrients in today’s food typically has less than 50% as much as we had. As bad as all else is the fact that they, unlike us, don’t know how good food can taste!
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