This morning I watched the time trial, the penultimate day of the Tour de France, and fell asleep halfway through. I nodded off during a bike race I’ve been watching for three weeks. (I slept just over seven hours last night, too, which is the most in a long time.) I had lunch over a History Channel documentary. We watched the 2010 LSU at Auburn game off the complete season DVD set. I took a picture of Cam Newton’s almost mythical run off the television screen. The announcers said “Oh did he accelerate!” and “Enjoy a young man fulfilling his athletic potential.”
The Yankee gave me the DVD set of the 2010 perfect season as a Christmas gift this year. We’ve been working our way through that magical year over the summer. Every week we start the game and I say “I hope Auburn wins!” Then the Tigers win and we say “War Eagle!” and “Merry Christmas!” Great gift, right?
And then, Batman Begins! When that ended, on another channel, The Dark Knight! My lovely bride made dinner, putting delicious salmon on the grill. I took a picture of it:
I really need to get out of the house. And, also, I need to be able to walk around for more than five minutes without my shoulder and collarbone killing me.
And now, to end on a more positive note, something cute:
I’m sore. I’m tired of hurting. And tired. I haven’t had a decent night of sleep since hurting myself and being tired isn’t helping matters much. So instead of complaining, let’s just change the subject.
I sat at this desk the other day:
It belonged to flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker when he was running Eastern Airlines.
Race car driver, pilot, ace, war hero, Medal of Honor winner, businessman and more, Eddie Rickenbacker is one of the great American icons of the first half of the 20th Century. He died quietly, almost forgotten in 1973. My history professor, the great W. David Lewis (1931-2007) of Auburn University, talked glowingly of Rickenbacker. He researched, for 15 years, his hero — including during the year or so I took his classes — and his book, came out in 2005.
Lewis was a character, full of life and passion for his varied interests. He was a renowned professor of the history of technology, loved cathedrals, pipe organs and, of course, aviation. I saw the autobiography, thought of Dr. Lewis and picked it up. On of these days I’ll pick up my professor’s book; I have to after reading these reviews.
I also met a man last December who worked for Rickenbacker at Eastern Air Lines. He told a story of having a real bad flight, being worked up about and then giving Rickenbacker, the president, an earful … only he didn’t realize who he was talking to. Rickenbacker nearly died in a plane crash in 1941 (dented skull, head injuries, shattered left elbow and crushed nerve, paralyzed left hand, broken ribs, crushed hip socket, twice-broken pelvis, severed nerve in his left hip, broken knee and an eyeball expelled from the socket) and was adrift in the Pacific, dangerously close to the Japanese, for 24 days in 1942. Rickenbacker won his Medal of Honor for attacking, on his own, seven German planes, shooting down two in 1918. He also won seven Distinguished Service Crosses. Eddie Rickenbacker knew a few things about having a tough day (His book begins, “My life has been filled with adventures that brought me face to face with death.”) so he let the indiscretion slide.
Because Dr. Lewis wrote the definitive biography on Eddie Rickenbacker, he was also able to convince his estate to donate many of his papers and belongings to Auburn. That desk sits in the special collections section of the RBD Library.
You aren’t supposed to sit at that desk, the librarian told me, but “You don’t look like your up to anything, though.”
So military and aviation buffs should now be jealous that I’ve sat at the great man’s desk. I could have opened the desk drawers to see what was inside, but that seemed a more private thing.
Instead, I read some turn-of-the-20th century recollections from some of the old locals. Some of those notes will get shared here, too, eventually. Probably in the next few weeks when I’ll basically be confined to the arm chair.
You have them, we have them. Our Fourth of July tradition involves going to Dreamland, which we visited in Montgomery this evening, enjoying some ribs and pudding and then settling in for an evening of fireworks. So this is a running quilt of summer memories, reading left to right, from top to bottom.
Happy Fourth of July. Hope yours is as good as mine.
Fireworks are the most temporal of our celebrations. After the fact you’re happy their gone. You can think mean things of the neighbors still lighting them after the calendar suggests they should be stowed for New Year’s Eve.
Never mind that the Declaration of Independence was first published in a newspaper on July 6th. We forget it was shipped to the Brits and read publicly on the 8th. Few recall that Gen. George Washington had it read to his soldiers on the 9th and that it was August before the signings began. The vote was the 4th and that’s when the fireworks retailers really need help getting their revenue in order, so that’s when we buy and light the things.
Fireworks on the 6th of July are just right out. There’s just no ring to that whatsoever.
You can light fireworks early, that’s festive. Unless your neighbors are the type that call the cops. Police officers hate the “shots fired” call which is really Old Lady Eveready mistaking your firecrackers for a revolver. Some cities burn through their pyrotechnic budget before the grand day. Opelika is one of those towns. Their “Celebration of Freedom” was tonight.
They have food and music and inflatables and face painting. The local parachute group leaps into the sky to bring the American flag to the city elders. Kids have scattered out decorated paper plates beforehand, hoping the guy with the flag lands on theirs so they win a prize.
People are sprawled everywhere in the beds of pickups and in lawn chairs. Two teenagers are making out and some old people nearby really wish they’d just stop. People see each other outside of work or school or church, maybe for the first time in a long time. Kids are playing tag over here and blowing bubbles over there. The entire scene is almost perfect and lovely. The only thing missing is John Mellencamp.
Promptly at 9 p.m. organizers throw thousands of dollars into the night sky and hope that, while it doesn’t reach escape velocity, it somehow catches fire and burns in many colors and shapes and sounds. More often than not that is precisely what happens. Here’s tonight’s finale:
For the video I shot last year I wrote “why not make it a several day celebration? A birth of a nation should merit that.”
Why not, indeed.
God bless America on this Third of July.
memories / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Memories of Andy Griffith, who died today at 86 3 Jul 12
To grow up in a certain time — which was, really a stretch of about 30 or 40 years thanks to syndication — meant a friendly and devoted relationship with Andy Griffith. My generation met him as the kindly sheriff and father from Mayberry.
A little bit later we were all introduced to this other side of Griffith, the brilliant work of the comedian:
And then later we learned of his outstanding early movie work. Suddenly the kind old Mayberry father-figure (He debuted as Andy Taylor a year younger than I am now. So I take it back; he wasn’t old, it was a trick of the black-and-white film.) was young. He was 32 when the hysterical No Time for Sergeants play debuted as a movie:
Did you catch Corporal Klinger in there? Jamie Farr played the un-credited co-pilot in the movie.
Years later we’d see A Face in the Crowd, and it would turn everything upside down. Andy Griffith as a bitter, cynical, hard Lonesome Rhodes? It changed everything. It was hard to process this man playing a role like that when you had the ability to see Andy Taylor (and Matlock, and some of us just assumed we could make Matlock an extension of the Taylor character, sort of an apology for RFD in a new setting) on your television almost every day for your entire life.
He’d say later he’d had exactly one acting class before that film which, by the way, holds up remarkably well, 55 years later.
After a while he could only work those heavy roles, but it was the character from Mayberry that endured, persisted and informed us as an audience. For all of his range, as an actor and generationally, what happened in that fictional little North Carolina town is what everyone thought of this morning when they heard the news.
It rarely makes the list of the greatest Andy Griffith Show episodes, but the first seven minutes of “Class Reunion” should be issued to anyone who wants to learn how to write Southern characters, and how to act them. Beginning with Knotts and Griffith moving a heavy trunk and worrying that one of their pants might’ve ripped, the conversation evolves into a discussion of those “make money in your spare time” ads, and then a conversation about what’s in Knotts’ trunk, starting with a rock that Knotts used to strike a match on to light his father’s pipe.
Here’s that scene, and it is pitch perfect still:
And of course the smartest thing Griffith ever did on that show was to play it straight. Don Knotts was destined to be the comedic relief, but that wasn’t the original plan. Andy Taylor held the town together, but Barney Fife brought the show down through the generations:
Here’s Griffith just after Knotts died in 2006:
Here they are together in 1996, both near 70 years old and 36 years after the show took the air. Griffith says Mayberry, shot from 1960 through 1968, was really about the 1930s. They’re talking about the characters, which is just about the most charming conversation you could imagine two old men having:
Did you know the great theme had lyrics?
Well, now, take down your fishin’ pole and meet me at the fishin’ hole,
We may not get a bite all day, but don’t you rush away.
Makes you want to run right out for an Andy Griffith marathon.
