Stitched Together

by Bob Thompson

  With the sound of machine-gun bullets, mortars, and screaming airplanes on TV, the added three-dimensional realism was too much for Ricky and he rolled sideways off the chair, scrambled on all fours halfway down the canned goods aisle before gaining his feet in a crouch and zigzagging out the front door.

  He never came back on Tuesdays—and he never boxed or joined the army either. He was the only customer I ever lost, but Granny said it was okay. He never bought more than a 6-cent Coke anyway.

  Beta Club

  For the past twelve months I had been looking forward to the State Beta Club Convention, where I hoped to be elected president, the crowning jewel of my high school career. I was already Mr. Heath High School, the Future Homemakers of America (FHA) Beau, VP of the senior class, an officer in the Future Teachers of America (FTA) and Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), on the newspaper and yearbook staff, a Boys State delegate, a Junior Rotarian, and manager of the school’s bookstore, but this would be my first statewide office.

  During the five-hour drive in early December from Heath High School along the new Western Kentucky Parkway toll road to Louisville, I had been going over the possibilities. I was experienced; this was my third convention. I was not awed by the big city anymore and was sure to be elected president of the convention. It was a certainty. My main competitor, the kid who’d barely beaten me for the office of secretary last year, had eligibility problems with his grade-point average, forcing his removal from the race. I knew of no other candidate who was of my stature or had my command of oratory.

  It was generally agreed that I was a shoo-in, but the honors and accolades were not all that was on my mind—in fact, they paled beside the exciting prospect of seeing Claudia again. We had met at last year’s convention and the memory of her gave me chills. I had not been able to find her at this year’s registration area, so I didn’t know where she was staying and hadn’t located her in opening ceremonies at the Louisville Gardens this morning.

  Now all those possibilities and promises were gone, washed away in the blink of an eye.

  I should have practiced my campaign speech instead of concentrating on my acceptance remarks, but how was I to know that a six-foot-six, blond-haired, blue-eyed basketball star with an appointment to the Naval Academy had, at the last minute, thrown his hat into the ring?

  I should have been prepared for every eventuality and not let anything deter me. Maybe, if it had just been a single thing, this unexpected challenger, perhaps I could have coped, but just as I was introduced and started up the stairs to the speaker’s podium I saw Claudia sitting beside him. And not just sitting there, but holding his hand! As I approached the lectern, my head started spinning. I forgot my opening line, the one that was supposed to get a laugh and loosen up the audience, and it was a death spiral after that. I stumbled, sputtered, repeated myself, and made no sense whatsoever. I don’t even remember my closing line. A whole year’s worth of seventeen-year-old fantasies, gone in a moment.

  In contrast, the challenger’s speech and delivery were as smooth as his all-American jump shot.

  It was not a good day. I was embarrassed, humiliated, and in the midst of having a major pity party for myself. What a disaster! I was not in the mood to see or talk to anyone and took a long, head-hanging, sidewalk-staring walk around the big city in the cold drizzling rain, thinking about what I should have done, what I should have said, and what could have been with Claudia.

  I finally found myself back at the convention headquarters, the Kentucky Hotel at Fifth and Walnut. I don’t remember walking into the lobby or pressing the button or getting on the elevator, but when I was in the car staring at the floor, I saw something I’d never seen before: a pair of black lace-up boots that disappeared under a purple silk robe.

  I hadn’t been in many elevators, and had never been this close to anybody wearing a purple silk robe. I started to slowly raise my gaze upward when the smell hit me: sweat mixed with rubbing alcohol and some sort of astringent medical smell. The robe was fancy, with wide red piping around the edges. Whoever was wearing it was huge. It was fastened with a red belt at the waist and then began to open in a V, exposing a beet-red and puffy chest. As my gaze traveled higher, I saw that the face was just as red and badly mauled. The area under the right eye was cherry red and so swollen that the eye was not visible. The left cheek wasn’t in much better shape, but at least the other dark eye was open and staring directly at me. I quickly looked down again and now noticed a pair of very foreign-looking black pointed shoes on the other side of the elevator. Looking up, I saw a man with a distinctive Latin look.

  Instantly I knew. Wow … I was in the elevator with Oscar Bonavena, the Argentinean heavyweight champion! I’d watched him on TV with my dad on the Friday Night Fights. Every Friday night Dad and I would lock up the grocery store and turned off all the lights so late-night customers wouldn’t stop, and watch the fights on the black-and-white television in the back of the store. Bonavena was in that tournament the World Boxing Association had set up after stripping Muhammad Ali of the title for refusing to be drafted and go to Vietnam.

  Yeah, I knew all about it. The tournament included the top eight contenders to determine the next champion, but Joe Frazier, the favorite, decided not to participate and that left Bonavena as the favorite. He had crushed that German fighter in his first fight—I’d seen it on the ABC Wide World of Sports, and now he was in the elevator with me! I knew he was the heavy favorite in the next fight with Jimmy Ellis, a Louisville kid who had Angelo Dundee as his manager, just like Ali. Wow! I hadn’t kept up with the schedule to realize that the big fight was here in Louisville! Tonight!

  This was no glass-jawed welterweight—this guy was a killer! He was big, strong, could hurt you with either fist, and geez, could he take a punch! I’d seen him fight Joe Frazier twice, going twenty-four rounds and not even get knocked down. He’d lost both fights but still … he’d taken Joe’s best shots and was still standing at the end. God, this was part of history and I was standing here with him.

  The fight must have been at the Freedom Hall just a couple of miles away. We’d driven past there coming into town. It was supposed to be on TV around the world, and from the looks of him I didn’t think he’d won. If Jimmy Ellis took a beating worse than this guy, he’d need an ambulance. Man, this guy looked hurt!

  I just had to look up at that face again. He wasn’t looking at me this time; he was looking at the guy across from him. They were talking in Spanish. Yeah, he had lost, I could feel it. He was pissed. The other guy said something. Oscar just shrugged and looked at me again. I looked down.

  I felt like a small, never-to-be-recorded part of history, but still a part. I felt like the guy who helped Napoleon off his horse after his defeat at Waterloo or the guy who served Ralph Terry a beer after he’d just given up that ninth-inning walk-off home run to Bill Mazeroski in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series.

  God, he must be embarrassed! I’d read in the papers a couple of days earlier that Bonavena had bragged that Ellis wouldn’t last two rounds, and now he’d gotten the crap beat out of him while the whole world watched and listened. Man, had he ever been counting his chickens before they hatched. He’d probably been practicing his acceptance speech too.

  The elevator stopped, and Oscar and his manager got off. The door shut, and I just stood there frozen in the moment, waiting for the next amazing event in my life to unfold. Nothing happened; the elevator was not even moving because I’d forgotten to push a button, but for some reason I felt better.

  The next morning I went down early and got a paper. Yeah, Ellis had killed him, fought the fight of his life, knocked him down twice. Broadcast all over the world!

  I didn’t feel so bad. I hadn’t really lost anything, just my pride, and few people knew or would remember that. Things could be worse, a lot worse—I could have gotten the crap beat of me with the whole world watching. I’d seen it, stood next to it, and felt the vibe.

  Jimmy El
lis went on to beat Jerry Quarry and become the second Louisville fighter in a row to hold the world heavyweight title. But it was downhill after that for both Jimmy and Oscar. Jimmy lost the title to Joe Frazier, and a few years later I read a news article about Oscar getting shot on his way into a Nevada brothel. What a shame.

  I’d forget Claudia but I’d always remember Oscar and what a bad day can look like.

  The grocery in Ragland, Kentucky, founded by my grandfather Roy Parker, late 1940s. The rooms along the left side of the store were the family’s residence.

  The family grocery in the mid-1950s. Mom and I are on the porch as Dad prepares to make a supply trip to Paducah in the 1950 Studebaker.

  Henry Turner and Calmore Rudolph in the grocery’s front porch overflow seating area during a rain shower, 1960s. OSHA rules about smoking near the gas pump were not yet in effect. The vehicles are parked in the lot on the other side of Ogden Landing Road.

  Granny (Myrtle Parker) and me in front of Memorial Hall after my University of Kentucky engineering school graduation, May 1973.

  The still-sleepy author and his mom in their Sunday best at the checkout counter of the Ragland grocery, mid-1950s. Loaves of Bunny Bread are on the Kirchhoff’s Bakery metal stand.

  The curly-headed author and Granny at the garage behind the grocery. The photo was taken around the time of my grandfather Roy Parker’s death in the Ohio River.

  Neighbors Bunk and Vernona Carneal in their burley tobacco patch in Ragland, 1970s. Bunk drove the school bus and took me hunting and fishing. Vernona was a cousin, schoolteacher, and the earliest encourager of my writing in the third and fourth grades at Ragland Elementary.

  An ancestor of Bunk’s Hereford bull with my grandfather Robert Wiley Thompson. Notice that Grandfather is wisely keeping his distance.

  Bloom Burkhart, my great-uncle, crappie fishing in cypress-lined Crawford Lake, 1960s. He is sculling the wooden johnboat with his right hand while tending the pole with his left; his minnow bucket, tackle box, and landing net are arranged for easy access.

  Waiting for the school bus at the back of the family grocery (1957), I’m standing in front of the Warm Morning stove and beside the seasonal garden-seed rack. The hardware bin, the wall of hand tools, and the bench are to the left of the picture.

  My first meeting with Uncle Fuzz, just before he left for Korea, 1951.

  Mom (Colleen Thompson) practicing at her Baldwin Acrosonic before church, 1960s. It was at this piano that she taught generations of local kids to play.

  Colleen Parker as a teenager at her family’s grocery/home, 1940s, before the front porch was expanded.

  The home-from-college author recharging at the back of the grocery in front of the community television, circa 1969.

  Charlie Long posing for a picture at the desk of his office manager (Si Hall), 1980s.

  The snappily dressed author, Vernona Carneal, and Junior Holly at the McCracken County spelling bee, circa 1962.

  Granny feeding the rodent-control and expired-dairy-disposal crew at the back of her grocery, 1964.

  My parents, Bob and Colleen Thompson, on Bob’s ninetieth birthday at an assisted living facility in Paducah, December 2013.

  The unpredictable Hunter trying to look nonchalant and harmless at the bird feeder, 2014.

  The Pont du Gard, the highest and best preserved Roman aqueduct bridge over the Gardon River in southern France, 2008.

  My son, Ian Thompson, halfway through his dive from the cliff top at the Pont du Gard, 2008.

  Ian Thompson admiring the biggest fish he ever caught, 1988.

  My pre-jump training at the Elizabethtown–Fort Knox Regional Airport, 2011.

  The instructor had to tap me on the shoulder to remind me to look at my altimeter. I pulled the ripcord at five thousand feet over Elizabethtown, 2011.

  Ian Thompson at Little League fielding practice, 1993.

  Colonel Bob in the storytelling rocking chair of the Kentucky Homefront radio show, 2016.

  The flagger out in front of a Footprints for Peace walk, 2015.

  I posted my daily progress during the Walk for a Sustainable Future to an elementary school class in Crestwood, Kentucky, 2015.

  Larry Crane, my spirit ally and the other Old Fart, 2014.

  A congress of old crows: Bob Kehrer, Larry Crane, me, and John Gage near Weaverville, North Carolina, 2015.

  The L’Escapade café in Merville-Franceville-Plage, France, 2015. The plaque marks the spot of a previous adventure.

  Ben

  I hadn’t started first grade when Rosa Parks got arrested on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus for not giving up her seat to a white person; but the bus boycott born from the incident was still going on when I started school the next fall. Although there was not a word about it in My Weekly Reader.

  From the age-appropriate newspaper passed out at school on Friday afternoons, I learned that the wheat penny was going to be replaced by the Lincoln Memorial penny, that Don Larsen had pitched a perfect game in the World Series, and that something called a Cold War was going on, but in my world, I knew nothing about Rosa Parks.

  By the time I was in second grade, my family had a black-and-white television and I saw John Chancellor at Little Rock Central High School, where the governor wouldn’t allow the admittance of nine black kids. That world seemed very far away from my house, where a black person had never set foot and where every neighbor for miles around was a white European-descended Christian.

  When I was in my first year in high school, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and suddenly there were four black kids in my class, but I had little social interaction with any of them. I didn’t make my first real black friend until my first semester in college. At Murray State University, two years of Army ROTC were mandatory but, eager to enhance my soldierly experience, I joined Pershing Rifles, a military fraternity requiring a pledge process akin to boot camp. My pledge group of sixteen had more African Americans than my high school class and we elected one of them, Ben Howard, a six-foot-four football player from Chicago, as the class vice president. Enduring the following weeks of pre-dawn calisthenics, verbal harassment, and countless punitive push-ups, Ben and I learned to trust and depend on each other. So by the time we were finally inducted into full membership in November, we were close friends.

  Murray was only a couple of hours from my parents’ home in western McCracken County, and the Sunday morning after our induction, I decided to surprise Mom and Dad with an unannounced visit and thought it’d be very cool if Ben came with me.

  My parents and Granny were at church when we got to their house, so to keep from getting blocked into the driveway when they came home, I parked the car next door behind the grocery store and took Ben inside to show him where I grew up. In my room at the back of the house, neither of us heard my parents’ car pull into the driveway at the very moment that Ben headed back to the kitchen to refill his water glass. Mom, with an urgent call of nature, had jumped from the car before Dad could bring it to a full stop. In her rush, she gave little thought as to why the front door might be unlocked. Pulling her dress up as she ran, she rounded the corner into the living room at the same moment Ben arrived from the opposite direction. Mom flattened her nose into Ben’s sternum.

  I rushed down the hallway when I heard her gasp, “Ohhh” and was just in time to see her knees buckle and Ben catch her under the arms as she slid down his front. I will never forget Dad’s befuddled look as he paused at the front door, surveying the scene. It was a physically and emotionally awkward moment for all. Suddenly, the world was not so far away from our house; if we had not previously understood the implications of the Civil Rights Act, we did now.

  When I think back about the civil rights movement of the 1960s, I do not think of Rosa Parks or the Little Rock Nine or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I think of Ben Howard helping my mom to her feet and of the lunch, conversation, and beginnings of understanding that followed. In retrospect, I did not afford my
parents the luxury of, as MLK said, “taking the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

  Rupp

  Growing up in Kentucky, I was like every other kid not from Louisville; it was my dream to play basketball for the University of Kentucky. Every afternoon after school and every weekend, I’d pedal my bicycle the half mile up to Ragland Elementary School to practice my dribbling and jump shots at the two goals in the asphalt parking lot. Saturdays and Sundays, I could expect enough other boys to choose up into teams, but weekday afternoons I often had the court to myself. During my practice drills I was always aware of cars coming down Ogden Landing Road. I could hear them cross the wooden bridge over Newton Creek and then slow for Turner’s Hill, the sharp uphill curve coming out of the creek valley just before you reached the school. I would time my jump shot to coincide with the car coming around the curve, believing my dreams depended on whether it went in or not. I was convinced that one of these days Adolph Rupp would be in that car, prowling the back roads of the Commonwealth for future talent. At the top of the hill he would see my picture-perfect jump shot swish through the net and pull into the school parking lot. He’d ask me my name and what grade I was in before offering me a scholarship to wear the blue and white jerseys of Cliff Hagan, Wah Wah Jones, Cotton Nash, Pat Riley, Louie Dampier, and Frank Ramsey.