This week’s Throwback Thursday takes us back to 1999 when Cindy and I drove to the Hilton Head Disney Resort so we could spend a couple of days relaxing; but more especially to see the Perseid meteor shower on the completely unlighted, pitch black beach at 4am in the morning.
Shadow was the one-time mascot of the resort and, though no longer present in this life, still had a doghouse and dish to serve as a reminder.
Here I am showing how I’m always in danger of being in the doghouse.
Do you suffer from Coulrophobia? If you have a fear of clowns, you do.
I will confess to never having heard of such a fear until I met Cindy and she told me she has a very real fear of clowns. It was strange to me, as I always thought clowns were funny and made people laugh (with the exception of the, in my opinion, masterful twist that Stephen King used by making Pennywise the Clown a personification of fear and evil in his story, “It”), with their painted on smiles and exaggerated features.
Not so for those who are afflicted with Coulrophobia. The very things about clowns that make some people laugh cause fright in those with Coulrophobia. As a kid, I watched Bozo the Clown on TV most mornings or afternoons and when my grandfather took me to the circus I laughed and laughed at the faces, clothing and antics of the clowns. But those same aspects, especially the made up faces that feature huge smiles, white faces, and overly exaggerated features like eyebrows and cheeks, cause a totally different reaction for those with a fear of clowns. Experts say that it is because those very aspects hide the real person from being observed, causing unease and even fear in some.
So, if you are one of the countless people who would identify yourself as having Coulrophobia, please don’t look at the photo below.
In May of 1999, Cindy and I took a Disney Cruise to the Bahamas and Disney’s private island, Castaway Cay. We had a great time!
This picture, that Cindy took in Nassau, originally appeared on a web page I used to post our photos and gave me a chance to poke fun at myself and the weight I had gained since getting married two years earlier.
I’m STILL trying to lose it!
It was on this date 46 years ago, July 20, 1969, that Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) became the first man to step foot on the moon. I joined an estimated half a billion people around the world as I watched him take that first step off the lunar module onto the moon’s surface at approximately 11:00 pm EDT, and heard his words, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” come back from almost a quarter of a million miles away.
He was the first man on the moon.
From The Writer’s Almanac:
It was the first manned moon landing. The lunar module, dubbed Eagle, was piloted by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In order to land on the moon, the Eagle detached from the main spacecraft command module (called Columbia and piloted by Michael Collins). As the lunar module approached the moon’s surface, Armstrong noticed that the Eagle was going to overshoot the planned landing site and was headed for a patch of boulders. With only seconds’ worth of fuel remaining, Armstrong steered the landing craft to a better location and brought her down safely. Six hours after touching down, Armstrong stepped off the module’s ladder and became the first earthling to set foot on another celestial body. He had planned his speech carefully: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Because the transmission was cutting out, people thought he said “small step for man,” but he insisted that he said “a man.”
The Eagle left a crater a foot deep in the soft soil, which Armstrong later described as being like powdered charcoal. Armstrong and Aldrin got right to work, gathering soil and rock samples and taking photographs, in case the mission needed to be aborted. They also performed a series of exercises, and found that it was fairly easy to get around on the moon, even though the powdery soil was slippery. The astronauts left behind some scientific equipment, an American flag, and a plaque, which read: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.”
On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the first atom bomb was successfully detonated at White Sands Proving Ground in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The assembled scientists wore welder’s goggles and shared suntan lotion. Enrico Fermi took bets on whether the atmosphere would ignite and destroy just the state of New Mexico, or the entire planet.
The explosion lit up the sky. The desert sand, largely made of silica, melted and turned to a light green, radioactive glass. Ken Bainbridge, the Harvard physicist in charge of the whole enterprise, known as the Manhattan Project, turned to J. Robert Oppenheimer and said, “We are all sons of bitches now.”
On August 6th and August 9th, the United States bombed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the only time nuclear weapons have been used in the history of warfare.
Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac for the above.
Eight years ago, almost to the day, I attended my very first Major League Baseball game. It was Sunday, July 15, 2007 and I was in Atlanta, Georgia training for my new position. I had the day off, so I decided to drive down to Turner Field and watch the Atlanta Braves host the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Although not a huge baseball fan, I know enough to enjoy the game and just being there in person to watch was a kick all by itself. A couple of years later I was back in Atlanta and some co-workers and I went to see a game together, but this game on July 15th will always be remembered as the first time I attended a Major League Baseball game in person.
By the way, the Braves beat the Pirates 5-1 that day.
As I mentioned in Part one of “I’d “Sooner” Not”, driving around Oklahoma City has brought back memories. Here is another early one of our time when we first arrived here 38 (or maybe it was 39) years ago.
During one of the early days of my arrival here in June, I was driving to an office when I saw something very familiar, but also very different. As I drove past it I realized it was the drive-in restaurant where I had my first job when we first arrived in OKC. It was a different name, but the exact same layout and location, even though many things around it were different. A few days later I was in the area again and this time I stopped to take some photos.
The sign now reads “Charcoal Oven” but it used to be Bonaparte’s Drive-in in the late 70’s and that multi-story building behind it wasn’t there at the time. To the left, behind the silver or gray car, you can see the “restaurant” building which was just a kitchen, line prep area, pick up window, office and storage rooms. You would drive in on this side of the sign, pick up your order and drive out or park on the other side of the sign. On busy nights, the line of cars waiting in line on the street would block cars from pulling out onto the street unless someone was nice enough to leave a space at the exit.
My first job in OKC was as a night manager at a popular, local drive-in only restaurant named Bonaparte’s Drive-In. Back in the late 50’s and early 60’s its main claim to fame was that you could drive through, order your food and then park under a covered area and young ladies in skates would deliver your food to your car on one of those trays that hung off the car’s door and you could sit and eat and talk with your passenger(s). The menu was a standard one of burgers, fries, onion rings, cokes, and shakes.
By the time I arrived in the late 70’s almost everything was the same except the young ladies would just walk your order out and a new menu item had been added a few years before; fried pickles. I’d never heard of such a thing, but they were a huge hit in OKC. The general manager, a nice guy named Jim Riley, was also experimenting in the kitchen with another new (for this establishment) menu addition; fried chicken. Jim managed the place during the day and I managed it at night, but we had about an hour overlap in our schedules and he was training me in how to cook his fried chicken in a sort of high-tech (for the time) pressure cooker/fryer machine.
Friday and Saturday nights the line of cars waiting to get in extended out the property and a half-mile or so out into the street, which was called N.W. Expressway, a four-lane street separated by a median strip. We didn’t close until 2 or 3 am on those nights and the bulk of our business at that time of the day (night? morning?) came from local bars that had closed at 1 or 2 am, if I’m remembering the times correctly.
Jim finally got the process down for cooking his fried chicken and when we added it to the menu I tapped into my negligible drawing skills to produce a cartoon image of him holding a drumstick up in his right hand while wearing a superhero-style spandex suit, complete with cape, and a large “C” overlapping a large “R” for Colonel Riley on his chest as his left arm clutched a handleless bucket full of chicken to his side. He seemed proud of that drawing and hung it in the office area for all to see.
I also suggested we put on the drive-in marquee “Come try Colonel Riley’s NEW Fried Chicken, Best in the City” which he did but one day later the lawyers from Kentucky Fried Chicken (which had a restaurant about a mile down the road) called and the owner of Bonaparte’s said we had to take down the “Colonel Riley” portion, lol. You can guess why.
I had started working there in July or August and I was still there by the time winter rolled around. I was sitting in the office one night doing paperwork when one of my crew suddenly said, “Hey look, it’s snowing!” and I looked up from the desk and out the window to see that it was indeed. That was the first time I had seen snow in person and not on TV or a movie. I was pretty excited.
That excitement certainly faded once I saw the dirty, nasty mess the white snow had become the next day. And it completely lost its appeal when our car broke down and we had no extra money to buy the parts for a few weeks and I had to walk the 5 miles from our apartment to the restaurant and then 5 miles back. A few days later my shoes had holes in the soles, so I had to put on a pair of socks, then wrap my feet in empty plastic bread bags, then put on another pair of socks so I could walk to and from work through the snow and ice without my feet getting soaking wet, They were still freezing cold, but at least they were dry. I would take off the outer pair of socks and hang them in the office to dry while I was working and then put back on the bread bags and now damp socks to walk back home.
Today, as you can see from the photo above, the place is called “Charcoal Oven” but everything, from the outside at least, looks the same. Of course there are LOTS of additions and changes to the area during the past almost four decades. Where I parked next door to take the photo above used to be a Shakey’s Pizza, but today is some kind of credit union office. N.W. Expressway expanded from 4 lanes to 8 lanes and there are SO many more businesses along the street than there used to be.
I looked online for photos of the old Bonaparte’s sign, but had no luck in finding any. I did come across this post in an online forum; “bonapartes closed down in ’84/’85, they had a big blowout on the last night, had cars from all over the state lining the street to get in.”
This is probably the end of the “I’d “Sooner” Not” posts because sometimes going back is just not what we need to do. But thanks for reading!
Today we go back to May of 2001 and my younger brother Mark and I are visiting our mom at her home.
Here’s a photo of my mom back in 1990 when she was working at the Deaf Services Center in Ocala, Florida as an interpreter for the deaf. Mom would have been 82 today.
Click For Larger Photo
On April 19, 1995, at 9:02 am, the single largest act of domestic terrorism our country has ever experienced took place at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was a day that began like any other day for the Federal workers, visitors to the various agencies in the building and children in the daycare center for workers’ children.
The eventual death count reached 168, including 19 children. One was a nurse who was struck in the head by falling debris as she worked to treat victims still trapped in the building. Hundreds of others were injured in the blast and subsequent building collapse, some for life.
President Bill Clinton said at the time, “The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack on innocent children and defenseless citizens. It was an act of cowardice and it was evil. The United States will not tolerate it, and I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards.”
The aphorism of the museum and memorial is this;
When Cindy and I visited New York City in January of 2013, we decided we could not visit the 9-11 Memorial because we did not think we could endure the empathetic pain associated with it.
I had the same feeling of dread when I visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum on Saturday, June 27th and after walking through the memorial and museum, I wish I had listened to that sense of dread and skipped the visit. It was soul-wrenching to listen to the sound of the blast that was recorded during a Water Reserve hearing in the building next to the Murrah building; to hear the screams of those who were injured and killed; to feel the fear and to see the carnage; and to re-live the tv news footage. At the end of my visit, I could not find the “offer of comfort, strength, peace, hope and serenity.” only a feeling of depression and sadness in the very core of my being.
All I can share with you are these photos.
Illustration showing the area from an aerial view and pointing out the historical and memorial locations.
The first fence was erected to protect the site of the Murrah Building and almost immediately people began to leave tokens of love and hope on the fence. Those items now total over 80,000 in number. Some are preserved in the archives. Today, more than 200 feet of the original chain link fence give people the continued opportunity to leave tokens of their own.
The reflecting pool occupies what was once N.W. Fifth Street. Here, a shallow depth of gently flowing water provides a peaceful setting for thoughts of remembrance. At each end of the reflecting pool stand monumental twin gates which frame the pool as well as the moment of destruction, 9:02. The East Gate has the time 9:01 engraved on it and symbolizes the innocence of the city before the attack. The West Gate, which has the time 9:03 engraved upon it, represents the moment Oklahoma City was changed forever.
The Field of Empty Chairs. Each of the 168 chairs symbolizes a life lost, with smaller chairs representing the 19 children killed. Arranged in nine rows, one for each of the nine floors of the building, they are placed according to the floor on which those killed were working or visiting, Each bronze and stone chair rests on a glass base etched with the name of a victim. By day, the chairs seem to float above their translucent bases. By night, the glass bases illuminate as beacons of hope.
The Survivor Tree is a 90+-year-old American Elm. On the day of the attack, it was almost destroyed in the blast. Pieces of concrete, metal, and glass were embedded by the explosion in the tree trunk and larger limbs, while all of the smaller branches and leaves were blown off the tree. Tender care has allowed the tree to live and flourish, and it now stands as a profound symbol of human resilience.
Looking out of the observation window in the museum, you can see the grounds, reflecting pool, Field of Chairs and the Oklahoma City Skyline.
A family walks beside the reflecting pool and in front of the Field of Chairs.
