What A Bunch

D Vertrees Hollingsworth 1937-2012

2012-02-14T09:04:00.001-05:00

The Great Pha died this morning, peacefully leaving us in his sleep.

San Diego Command, 1998

Characteristically, he wrote his own obituary:

DVHObit

D Vertrees Hollingsworth died on February 14, 2012,at age 74. He lived a fortunate life, doing things for which he was reasonablyprepared and appreciated, thereby gaining a wonderful family, a happy andadventuresome life and genuine pleasure in every day granted him.

He grew up on a Kentucky horse farm near Lexingtonduring World War II and learned the value of hard work and how to ridethoroughbreds. He was the last of fivechildren of a playwright and an engineer and so learned early on to love bothsciences and the arts. He was graduatedfrom Yale University with a degree in American Studies, from the University ofCincinnati College of Medicine as a Doctor of Medicine and completed anInternship at Receiving Hospital in Detroit, MI. During that era he met andmarried the love of his life, Alice Elizabeth Broadbent, with whom he begatfour delightful children.

Dr. Hollingsworth served in the US Navy as aLieutenant in the Medical Corps for two years in the Vietnam era, followed by aresignation of his Reserve commission and an entry into the private practice ofFamily Medicine on the same day Medicare took effect: 1 Aug 66. After 14 years of care for rural patients(“the skin and its contents”), he took his wife and three of his children offto serve his county (to Teach, to Travel, and to have some Time Off) as a NavalOfficer – first teaching young physician graduates the specialty of FamilyMedicine, then medical students at the F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine inthe Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences for nine years. Dr. Hollingsworth was graduated from theNaval War College and Salve Regina University with a Master’s degree inManagement and went on to serve as Commanding Officer at three Naval medicaltreatment facilities.

In 1998, he and his wife retired to Pinehurst, NC, wherehe spent seven years as a family physician at Fort Bragg and as an emergencyphysician in Laurinburg, NC. He wasactive in his church, Brownson Memorial Presbyterian in Southern Pines, NC, andjoined his musical wife in several community chorus efforts in every communityin which they lived. He was an amateuractor in numerous productions for more than 60 years.

He was predeceased by the sad loss of a belovedgranddaughter (10 year-old Liza Hollingsworth) but is survived by his wife of51 years, Alice B. Hollingsworth, and by four children: Eben L. Hollingsworth and family ofGeorgetown, KY, Sophia G. Hollingsworth of Charlotte, NC, Dunn D. Hollingsworthand family of Mt. Pleasant, SC, and E. Piel Hollingsworth and family of Milton,MA. At his death he had fivegrandchildren: Eleanor, Caroline and Jordan Hollingsworth as well as Maxwell andLucy Hollingsworth-Hays.

“Youonly live once, but if you work it right, once is enough”

A memorial service will be held at Brownson MemorialPresbyterian Church, Southern Pines, NC, on Saturday, February 18, 2012 at 11am with a reception to follow. There will be a gathering in honor of Dr.Hollingsworth’s life at Georgetown College’s Thomas & King ConferenceCenter in Georgetown, KY, on Saturday March 3 from 2:00 to 4:00.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to:Plowshares Institute, PO Box 243 or 809 Hopmeadow Street, Simsbury, CT 06070

The world will be a lesser place without him.

So Said Kent

2012-02-12T22:16:00.000-05:00

Last I wrote, we were leaving Pinehurst for some house building time in Lexington. That happened, and I will post some other day with more pictures of that project.

Facebook has taken some of the steam out of blogging.

However, Mary Anne and I are now back in Pinehurst. Pha can't get himself out of bed and Muv can't pick him up, so it's time for us to be back to help until the end. He is still not in pain, but he's certainly past even his ability to enjoy his time. God has gotten us all to the point where we are ready to say goodbye.

This may be the last picture of all five of Denzil and Polly's children together. I have it dated 1995 and it was taken outside of Mt. Horeb church.

As we reminisce, I thought it would be good to share the "So Said Kent" letter. My uncle Kent was in New York state in 1949, learning about horses and life. As he was away from the bluegrass on the occasion of his little brother's twelfth birthday, he wrote the missive below. The end sayings are classic Hollingsworth lore; I rarely make a long interstate drive when I don't apologize to Kent for getting cut off by another car (learn to see a pocket...). The picture below

hangs in the houses of my siblings and many of my cousins.

We were also touched on this round of re-reading of Kent's letter by the references to the Hollys. Cousin Hunter apparently calls the house we are building the Taj Mah Holly. Whatever anyone calls it, it should soon be home. We look forward to hosting family and friends there.

Enough intro, here's the letter:

Shipped into Belmont park yesterday afternoon on one of thehottest days of the year. Long Islandlooked like a populated prairie. Beautiful parkways are scorched, Jamaica’s infield looks like a huge eggshaped sand pit.

Buddy, Arnold Firckland, and I drove up from Delaware and itwas like riding a race all the way; Buddy jockey for positions, Arnold shoutedwhen it looked like we were going to be cut off, we rounded the field, and in afew scary moments, squeezed through on the inside. Race riding must really be tough.

Broke away late yesterday morning after watching low andhigh work a slow 5/8, sweated out an hour wait for the Staten lsland ferry butmade it up here in four and a half hours.

All of Buddy’s Belmont friends are giving him the business now. We ate last night in the restaurant where heand Helen always had dinner and I didn’t think we were going to get throughit. He was pretty good down in Delaware,but he’s getting right back to what he was when I first came up; silent,stares, red eyes, hollars a lot at the guineas, already scratched one, anotheron the way, nervous and jumpy as a fly.

We have a room, just across the road from the track. Cowboy and Beetle--one of the exercise boys--live in the same house. Our room is notmuch bigger than the hall closet. Twobeds and a dresser cover the floor like an all over rug. We both can’t put our shoes on at the sametime. The small window at one end thattakes up the whole wall, allows light an air to leak in sometimes. It is clean though.

Vertrees -- happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happybirthday dear Vertrees, happy birthday to you. (hum a little tune has you readthis and smile for you have received acknowledgement of your twelfthanniversary from your brother Kent). I thoughtperhaps of sending you a yacht , or complete baseball attire, or a lifetimesubscription to Looney Tunes, or a speedometer for your putt—putt, or a suitfrom Abercrombie and Fitch, or even a small motor car, but then I thought,psaw, this isn't the low type fellow who would want nasty old material gifts;he would find joy only in the thought. Rejoice quickly for I am about to change thethought to another paragraph.

As the 4th of July is a day of festivities, I took a day offand went to the races. Sure of the goodthing in the 6th, I laid the whole of Kent Hollingsworth’s estate on Mark High'sbig fat nose. I might just as well havelit a fire cracker with it; I’m sure I would have had more fun. Arnold broke late on him and he just could notcatch up in time. Mark High hasn’t gotmuch heart any way. If I ever tell youto bet on him again, even if he is picked all the way across the form, forgetit. Damned half-miler.

Dorcas-- am in the big town now. Buddy and I finagled two handsome tickets to SouthPacific. Yet to see them though. Saw the Statue of Liberty, rode on the ferry,swore at a cab driver, feel like real big New Yorker now. Wish you were here etc.

Got my first letter from my father today. Am about to return it this minute.

Sunday afternoon passes slowly at the race track. Got up late this morning, dragged out to thetrack, walked all the horses. Buddy walks all the horses on Sunday if he can,believes even horses like to have a break once a week. Got through with the work early, came back,had "over light, ‘tatas, coffee with", read three papers and theform, napped until 1:30, wrote my mother. A guy can bear with anything as long as there is a home in his mind hecan look back at. It's a realsupport. Those big, strong pillarsstanding sturdily on their rock foundations, have a value far exceeding thepuny $125,000 bills some peanut would like to exchange for them. They are big, secure, warm, home. They are because my mother made them so.

Without them, I would look around all the squalor and filththat I am walking through, and think, "what am I gunning for? What’s it getting me? Is it worth it?" With them, I am learning, liking what I’mdoing. I'm camping out. You and fatherdid a great deal when you invested your money in that home. I hope I can do as much for my children.

Buddy has no home you know. No family. Man asked him who hewas going to change his bonds and securities to, now that Helen had died, andhe was struck dumb. Said, “why I haven'tgot a person in the world" almost to himself after breathless minute. He hasn’t got a thing to live for right now. It sure is thin up here.

It’s dark and rainy out. The first rain in over a month beats against the petrified sod, rollsoff, slobbers at the mouths of sewers. Loadedcars splash by on the highway below, heading for the tip of the island and awashed out holiday. Everyone is in ahurry. I wonder why.

By heart alarmed everyone yesterday, pulled ahead at thehead of the stretch, faltered, was whipped to the wire by two others, a half ofa length separating them. A terriblerace, the next one was run three seconds faster; Arno surprised me by breakingso well, but when he came back he told me that he had just happened to nudgeher as the gates opened, give him a length jump on the rest. First time I’ve ever seen it happen, usuallyhis mount is backing up or just sleepy when the bell rings.

Rags to Riches worked a good half yesterday; been going hardwith this big sluggish thing, Arcaro asked for him- so bones, his agent, sayshe has no reason to hustle mounts -- I believe he'll be right there his nextout at $5000.

Letter from father said he could get no form, heard about ahorse a week after he won. Sent him theaddress of Georgie Wolf’s brother, who lives in Calgary, who bets, wears spats,purple vests, derbies, plays cards.

This is the day of my brother Vertrees' twelfth birthday. I hope that he, in the next eight years, hasas many good times, lucky breaks, laughs, loves, and lumps, as I have had, andone more candle to grow on. Son, listento your old brother and heed:

l) There are no cinch bets.

2) Don't tear up your tickets until the official is flashed.

3) Learn to see a pocket before you're in it.

4) It’s the guy with the kick in the last eighth that gets theglory.

So Said Kent

The originals, with typos and all:

The Captain

2011-10-16T16:45:00.001-04:00

My friend Lindsay actually calls TGP the Admiral, but Pha left the Navy before he made flag rank. And at the beginning of Pha's naval career, it was son of Commander going out with daughter of Captain that led to my marriage, but that's another story all together.

I realize this is supposed to be my blog and not only about my father, but I have to write about where we are today and what we are doing. And for now, that's a lot about my father. Mary Anne and I just returned from a quick trip to Mt. Pleasant. We saw her folks and Tom and Millie and it was a wonderful trip. We are now back in Pinehurst and will be for the next two weeks, as I work from "home". I am very much looking forward to no airplane on Monday morning.

Pha is continuing to do very well. As I said last time, his self-assessment is "strong as ox". He's hoping I can take him to the North Caroline State Fair in the next couple of weeks. We hear they deep fry Twinkies.

As long as Pha remains this strong, MA & I anticipate being in Lexington some. I have a new client (whose social media policy apparently prohibits me from mentioning who they are), but that client has an office in Denver and an office in Erlanger, KY. We're having national meetings an hour from the new house four separate weeks over the next couple of months. The plan is to be home for those weeks. Mary Anne is especially looking forward to having the puppies back. And I'll have some new house pictures to post.

Anyway, back to the old man. When I think of the Captain, I think first of a bone spur he had in the little toe of his left foot in the late 70s. Given the technology of the day, the thing to do then was to remove the bone from his little toe. Stop now, dear reader, and think about putting on your socks when you have no bone in your little toe. The toe actually bends backwards as the sock slips on.

Fast forward several years. Millstream 1.0 is behind us, and Pha has progressed from Commander to Captain. In fact, he is CO of the Naval Hospital in Rota Spain. Many folks got to visit him there, but in 1988, the thought of a 24 plane trip (4 flight segments) with 2 year old Eleanor was enough that my section of the Hollingsworth clan had to content ourselves with short, dollar-a-minute phone calls. One sunny afternoon in Rota, the CO got fed up with his little toe curling back as he got dressed in the morning. It was a slow day at the hospital, so Pha approached the surgeon on duty (probably a young 2nd lieutenant) and said:
"Son, take off my toe"
"Sir?"
"You heard me, Lieutenant. Take off my toe!"
"Sir?"
"Son, that's an order. Take off my toe"
So, TGP could no longer teach the grands to count to 20, only to 19. But a legend was born. And in an interesting later development, Grandmother also only has 9 toes, but that, also, is another story.

We're very grateful for the good times we are able to have here in Pinehurst and that Pha is in no pain. This period of grace won't last forever, but it is a blessing while it lasts.

For those of you watching this blog for updates, I'll try to do better at posting. I've got several good stories rattling around. Not flying for a few weeks may give me a chance to get them out.

The lame and the halt

2011-10-01T14:33:00.000-04:00

When Mary Anne and TGP head out together, she's the lame and he's the halt. They even call each other that. On Thursday, Muv and Pha and Mary Anne went to the matinee of Guys and Dolls at the Temple Theater in Sanford. Alice would have been the youngest one there if not for MA. One bus full of old people was full of grumpies who expected to be seated all together. Our intrepid three theater goers had bravely staked out the end of back row, closest to the bathroom. Since all of the grumpies had walkers or canes, there was some danger of a rumble. Even Pha with his walker wouldn't have been able to take them. In the end, however, everyone found their own seat and enjoyed the show very much.

Almost the whole family was here last weekend. We celebrated Sophia's birthday. Dunn & I were the bookends in this picture.

It was a wonderful time together. We played games and ate a lot, with each meal of course preceded by singing the Doxology.

Dr. and Mrs. Johnson came by for dinner Friday night. They have driven from Washington state, and made this date last April, before the health challenges become as hard as they have become. It's another blessing for TPG & Muv to have been able to host them again. Thanks to the Sautters and Walnut Hall farms for the wonderful steaks.

Cousin Berkley and Patti were with us for breakfast and a visit this morning. Folks keep coming out of the woodwork and the extra family time is a great thing. Berk had some edits on Pha's story about Dorcas's nose, but we figured it best just to let himself tell the story the way he remembers it. After all, Pha wasn't there when the event happened, just at St. Luke's office when Dorcas came in after the accident.

As I mentioned earlier, Pha is using the walker when he is out. Sometimes even the wheelchair. There is a grace in him not fighting the need for that. He continues to not have any pain, and in fact has been relatively strong this past week. Ask him how he is and on a good day, he will say "I am strong, strong like ox." (ed note: perhaps should be strong and stubborn like mule) However, the shortness of breath becomes more noticeable every day.

The opportunity for a fourth and last chemo is this week, but the consensus is the pain and difficulty it will cause will not be offset by enough benefit. That's for Pha and his oncologist to decide on Tuesday. For today, we've got football games being recorded for watching later this afternoon and we continue with the Hollingsworth motto:

Learn to bear what must be borne.

Downtown New Haven Good Time and Happy Fellows Club

2011-09-22T19:32:00.000-04:00

TGP arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1955. As a freshman on the Old Campus, he met Rocko and Bob because they were in his entryway. Paul was in three of his classes because the pre-meds were together in alphabetic order.
There were eight of them sophomore year, but for junior and senior year, they were six strong. They called themselves the Downtown New Haven Good Times and Happy Fellows Club. Apparently, they frequently led off dinner in Calhoun College by blowing the curtain rod that they turned into a horn (and later engraved with DNHGTHFC). Toot de de toot do toot. TGP stood behind the tall guys, Ted and Paul. They are pictured below in all of their glory, with the brass horn across their laps.

Paul (Killer) Killenburg

Horace (Rocko) Montague

Clyde Jones

D Vertrees (Holly) Hollingsworth (I refer to him as TGP)

Ted Calhoun

Bob Laird

Pha was, of course, the "exalted blower".
Clyde was the "Immortal water closet"
Rocko was the "Imperial Banger of the Board"
There were other names, but himself can't really recall them at this point.

There were ample other adventures. Rocko and TGP were discussing just this past weekend who first met Louie, the white lab rat. Rocko thought that Killer put it on TGP's desk. TGP is confident that it was Laird's desk, because Laird was a serious studier. Killer had "borrowed" Louie from the chem lab. Whoever met him first, Louie became a staple for the DNHGTHFC. Louie lived in the player piano in the living room of the suite. Louie liked it there because it was warm, but objected strenuously whenever anyone actually played the piano. Louie also tended to participate in the poker games that were a regular staple of the suite.
The roomies have made a nice habit, especially over the last 30 or so years, of spending some time together. Here they are in 1982, while the first of their progeny (?could that be me?) was in New Haven. I shared Calhoun with Killer's boy, Chris, starting my junior year. Note the bananas are now overripe.

Jones, Laird, Killenburg, Montague, Hollingworth

There is a VHS of the 35th reunion that I hope to get converted and posted. TGP does a lot of the talking for the class of '59. On an interesting side note, in Pinehurst, if a VHS tape goes bad, you have to go to the porno store to get it fixed. But, we will post what we can from that VHS tape when we can.

Fast forward to 2011. Killenburg died suddenly last year. Laird and Rocko made it to Pinehurst on Thursday for a last visit with TGP. The club now includes wives, since it is hard to get everyone together.

Lifelong friendships are a precious thing.

In recalling all of this, Pha says "We thought we were the cat's pajamas". I suspect they really were.

TGP Speaks

2011-09-17T17:37:00.000-04:00

He's not Garbo, but I've got three good stories.

Jumping in the tobacco barn (recorded 9/2011)

Aunt Dorcus' nose (recorded 12/2010)

The hardest day in private Practice (recorded 12/2010)

Our hole in the ground by the creek

2011-09-17T16:58:00.004-04:00

MA & I had a quick trip back to Kentucky last weekend. We got to see the progress on Millstream 2.0. A picture being worth a thousand words, I won't bother with any more description than is necessary.

First, if you missed it earlier, is the final demolition of Millstream 1.0

The view from the front. I hope to have a series from standing right here over the next few months.

The view from just outside the garage, then the view up from the creekbank toward the house (straight on and then a little left), then turning around to see the creek up close.

The hole in the ground which will be the foundation.

I think it is telling that I picked the picture of me swinging on the creek when I started this blog a few years ago. I'm looking forward to moving back home.

Pha Status Update Labor Day 2011

2011-09-05T18:06:00.002-04:00

It’s somehow hard for me to write these days. I had hoped a three day weekend would bring me a muse, or something. But here it is Monday and I’m just sitting down with the laptop. I will admit to a little encouragement because I stumbled across a comment from the Teddy Shapou's grandson's wife on my favorite post from April '09. Like a cook enjoys watching people eat, a writer really enjoys folks reading their words. At least I will get out a status report on Pha for those of you that are interested in how it is going here in Pinehurst.

I put TGP's 1993 autobiography on Facebook yesterday (from this blog in Jan '09). A little less maudlin than his posting his own obituary pre-emptively last month. It’s a good read.
I am trying to get himself in front of iMovie to tell some stories. I don’t think he’s up for writing at this point, but if I can coax at the right time, I think I get get some good recordings. I’ll post them as soon as they happen if we manage that. Caroline has a clip he did last Christmas about his sister, Dorcas. If I can get her to post it, I’ll add a link here.

Pha is surprised when he feels weak. Even with his heart problems and stroke 6 years ago, he still thinks of himself as never being sick. We got to church yesterday morning, but that was about all the activity the day could afford. We try to gauge the energy level and plan outings accordingly. His voice is strained and his balance is a challenge. But he is not in pain, has some appetite and can taste his food. Food not tasting like what it was supposed to was the worst part of the chemo for him. We watch something on Netflix or old home movies most every night after supper and relish whatever stories we get.

Sophia is coming from Charlotte to Pinehurst this weekend, as MA and I sneak back to KY for a quick visit. We will get her started on a new MS medication, Gilenya, which is exciting in that it comes in a pill form.

The college roommates (Yale '59) will be here the next weekend. The weekend after that, almost the entire family will be here. We will only be missing Paul, Max and Lucy. TGP will be up for those visits, as he was for the recent trip to Kentucky. Without the additional inspiration, he is a little weaker each day. It’s to be expected, but that doesn’t make it any easier on any of the four of us.
Mary Anne and I feel blessed to be able to be here and be some help, or at least a distraction. It’s a small benefit of the 1000+ mile commute that I can spend my weekends wherever seems appropriate. Pinehurst seems appropriate for the duration.
Muv and Pha have lots of pictures hanging on their walls and I am scanning everything I can. Many of them have lost their color, or most of their color. I asked cousin Rich to work on the 6 pictures from Thanksgiving 1970. None of my generation was married yet and Wright had yet to be born, but it’s as complete a shot of the extended family as I think anyone has. Below is Pha and his father, Denzil, in December 1940.

I also have some pictures Soph won’t want me to post of the time Muv and Pha inexplicably setup a family portrait for right after she had her wisdom teeth removed.

Hospice has been great. I keep encouraging people to use that BEFORE they get to the very end of life. It has relieved us all to know there won’t be fights about extraordinary measures at the end (can you imagine anything more anathema to Pha?) and they have been practical and emotional support, especially for Muv.

Keep those cards and letters coming for the folks that get mail here. Email and text encouragement for MA and myself are also appreciated. We may not start a lot of conversations, but we tend to respond.

I will certainly be regular with updates as we hit any salient points going forward.

Remember:
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

LI Annos

2011-08-15T20:51:00.000-04:00

August 15^th, 1960. 51 one years (LI Annos in Latin) ago today, Muv & Pha got married in Cadiz, KY. As they celebrate their last anniversary, it’s easy to see that there is no way for this couple to ever have enough time together.

See below his Anniversary present to her. The inscription is hard to read in the picture, but I typed it below. Pha had the tray made during the Lexington visit last week and I smuggled it back to Pinehurst. He gave it to Muv yesterday (even though they are big on doing things the day of) because she gave him a tie with horses on a Carousel that he was wearing for church Sunday morning. They met during a UK production of Carousel, must have been summer of 58.

LI Annos

We made beautiful things together

We travelled the world

What a joy, Amen

Children, music, laughter and theater

There are lots of tears around the house, but there is also grace in having enough time to say goodbye. Just as The Great Pha taught us how to live, he is teaching us how to die.

Mary Anne is in Pinehurst, at least for the next three weeks. I’m flying in and out to Denver, but will be around as much as I can.

Given that the last dose of chemotherapy seemed to give Pha enough strength for the farewell tour to KY, he’s scheduled himself for another round of chemo this week. He’s always been very good about measuring cost (both to us the taxpayer and to his comfort) versus the benefit of any therapy. Apparently, it feels like another round of the nasty drugs is worth it.

I’ll try to write as emotions and time allow. We welcome prayers for Pha and Muv and the whole family.

The shot below is from Soph's in Charlotte as they drove up to KY last week.

A day in the Life

2011-07-30T18:28:00.000-04:00

Alice and Vert

Eben in utero

Spent all day with TGP and Muv in Pinehurst today. Caroline has been here also.

We had bacon and cinnamon rolls for breakfast - the best morning meal in 51 years according to himself. Once you're off the Zetia and not really tracking the cholesterol, menu choices can become more interesting.

We spent time together on the computer, so I know my way around things. We spend a lot of time with old videos. A little more recorded local news coverage than I might have chosen if I were the editor, but intermingled with some great film of Pha and his three brothers and his sister. Also some 1991 shots of the cutest 2 & 5 year old girls you could ever hope to see.

Replaced oven range vent filters & cleared a bathroom sink. There is a hinge that was out of stock at Lowes that will fix a kitchen cabinet; that will wait for the next trip.

All in all, I can't image how I could have spent the day any better.

TGP goes into hospice

2011-07-26T22:06:00.000-04:00

Himself in 1959

My father, Vertrees Hollingsworth, was admitted to hospice today. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer over a year ago and it has recently metastasized to the lungs. Sophia, Dunn and Piel were with him over the weekend. Caroline will be there later this week. TPG & Alice hope to make it to Lexington in early August. Mary Anne and Eleanor and I will visit in NC later in August.

He's not in pain and, as always, has a great attitude. I'm glad we can start hospice early enough for it to be a real help. His oncologist is the Medical Director of the agency seeing him. I've dealt with hospice professionally for a couple of decades and it is a tremendous service.

We welcome prayers from all those who know himself or any of the rest of us in the family. It hasn't been an easy year+

Ten Days Post-Op

2011-03-13T17:04:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since my last update. We have been back from the hospital for over a week and Mary Anne has been getting better every day. The weather has been nice enough that she has been out of the apartment for 3 days in a row now.

Friday was a wheelchair ride in the sun late in the day after work. Saturday was a car ride, Mexican food and a couple of hours in a used book store. Today was a long wheelchair ride in the sun, then two laps around the sidewalk circle with the walker outside.

We have had 5 therapy visits and a couple of visits from the nurse. After working with home health for 20+ years, it's very enlightening to be on the receiving end of visits. The therapist always seemed to come after hard night and have a new technique for a transfer or stretch that made things better. Pretty much made me glad that I have have spent much of my career supporting these folks; they certainly provide tremendous support for their patients.

Mary Anne has been doing some watercolor journaling.

My picture doesn't do her work justice. It's been a great release for her and provides nice decoration for the mantelpiece.

It's not clear if Mary Anne will be ready to be independent by house closing day on March 28th - I think I may do that as a quick KY round trip. We're definitely set to be back in the bluegrass by opening weekend at Keeneland. It will be wonderful to be back home.

Discharged!

2011-03-05T13:28:00.000-05:00

Both of our old school Family Practice physician fathers would not approve of the large variety of doctors we have seen while we have been inpatient. We are waiting on our third "hospitalist" to sign the last of the papers so we can get out.

The transfusion went fine last night and MA has a little more strength today. She's sitting on the edge of the bed knitting. I have already made 4 trips to the car (two just for flowers) and we're packed except for computers and yarn. We've got home health orders and will have the PT, OT and nurse at the apartment periodically starting tomorrow.

Mary Anne is still having muscle spasms and some pain with movement, but it's a very different pain. The orthopedist (surgeon's partner) says that it's par for the course and will subside as she works through the new internal arrangement of bones, etc.

All in all, we're doing well and extremely glad to be headed back to the apartment and the terriers. Updates will be less frequent, but I'll let everyone know how the home therapy progressed.

Please know how much we have felt the prayers and the love of all of our family and friends. As they used to say at Bartles and James, thank you for your support.

P.S. Update as I finish - we've gotten the last of our D/C orders and will be headed out very soon

Another night in paradise

2011-03-04T20:17:00.000-05:00

CT scan showed no clots in the lung at all; that's good news. The current diagnosis is post-surgical anemia. We've just had the blood draw to cross check and get a couple of units of red packed blood cells. Everyone says herself will feel much better after the transfusion.

Thinking towards home tomorrow, our insurance wouldn't let us pick my home care agency to come serve us, so we'll have another outfit coming to the apartment. On the upside of the insurance, MA has new chariot.

We rented our wheelchair for the last month and bought our crutches at Walgreens, but the walker comes from the local medical supply place and is billed directly to insurance. Mary Anne keeps talking about pimping it out. I'll need to find some rhinestones or something once we get settled out of the hospital.

As the title says, one more night in paradise. The dogs have someone staying with them and I'm headed out to get some supper. Mary Anne, as usual, gets hospital room service. We should be back at the apartment by early afternoon tomorrow.

Thanks to all for the continued prayers and support.

A minor setback

2011-03-04T16:19:00.000-05:00

Mary Anne is getting a CT scan right now. We've been cleared by the Physical Therapist and the Occupational Therapist. The wound is looking fine. However, she has an elevated heart rate and the hospitalist wants to rule out any possibility of a pulmonary embolism. Even if there is any clotting, they will simply increase the anti-coagulant dose she is taking and probably observe for another day.

So we're slogging through. Best case, we still get to go home later today, but if I were a betting man, I'd think we've got another night here.

Had a nice dinner out last night with our new friends the Rews, the only folks we know out here besides my work colleagues. Time seems to stop inside hospital walls.

Probably a little rambly, and without the review I like to do, but hoping to get the word out.

Keep those prayers coming and I'll update again when I know more.

Day 2 post-surgery dawns early

2011-03-04T09:32:00.000-05:00

Things can frequently be harder when it's dark outside. The surgery anesthesia has fully dissipated, leaving Mary Anne pretty uncomfortable overnight. Hospitals are lousy places for rest anyway, and the return of some leg spasms didn't make it any easier.

She's sleeping comfortably now. She's off of all IVs and other hospital-only assists, so we remain hopeful for discharge orders soon. If not today, tomorrow.

Every new person that comes into the room comments that the flowers are beautiful and it smells great in here. We've also been informed that there will be chocolates back at the apartment. There is comfort in the small things.

I have to throw in a plug for Your Best Friend's Friend. The folks watching Scout and Sparky have been great with our last minute dog sitting needs. If you're in Denver and need dog help, call them.

I'll post again when I know when we get to go "home"

Post Surgery Day 1

2011-03-03T13:55:00.000-05:00

Well, it's loud in a hospital. MA's monitors, plus those for other patients on the hall, keep it from ever getting too quiet. Despite that, we had a good night's sleep last night.

So far today, we have seen the PT, OT and Case Manager (discharge planner). We're getting set up for some home care therapy visits at the hospital, hopefully as early as tomorrow (Friday). I've requested to have Centura Health at Home (my current client - they are why we are in Denver) deliver the care. If our overly complicated American insurance system will support it, we will be my client's patient.

Mary Anne is rating her pain a 2 on the 10 point scale, which is an order of magnitude better than the 9/10 she got to before surgery yesterday. We've heard from LOTs of friends that have been through this (or known others that have) and know to expect today/tomorrow/Saturday to be a little painful, but getting better with time.

Two weeks with only toe-touch weight bearing on the left leg, and after that more ambitious therapy. Hopefully, she'll be walking and we'll be able to come home to KY before too long.

I think we're both headed for a short pre-lunch nap. More tomorrow.

She has a new hip!

2011-03-02T19:11:00.000-05:00

The surgeon just came out to say that he's finished and everything went well. The new ball and socket went in as he had hoped and he expects a very good recovery. Given the weakness of the bone, Mary Anne will not be weight bearing immediately, but we will give it a couple of weeks to acclimate to the new setup. Still, her being able to toe-touch and have little or no pain will be an immense improvement.

MA is in recovery and I should get to see her in an hour and a half or so.

It's been a long day, but the 90 minute surgery is a vast improvement over the 11 hours in the surgical waiting room for TGP's heart surgery a few years ago. I did get out and get some lunch an hour ago.

We should get a good night's sleep tonight - the first in quite a while.

Thanks to all for the prayers and concern.

Surgery begins

2011-03-02T17:09:00.000-05:00

We finally saw the anesthesiologist and got MA some pain meds. I guess they didn't want to do it too soon before surgery. She was feeling much better and able to lay back on the table as they took her back to the surgery suite. Dr. Greenhow signed her left leg (that's standard protocol to be sure they do the correct hip in the OR). He says she should be back out in two hours, so I expect to know more by 5pm Mountain time.

Thanks to all for the prayers.

At the Hospital

2011-03-02T14:36:00.000-05:00

We arrived at the hospital about 11:40. The car ride was very uncomfortable.|

Found surgical waiting room. Went back to park car. Got registered and paid copay- very thankful for insurance.
12:25 they took MA back to get her settled and on an IV.
More later

Pre-Surgery

2011-03-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

The first in a a series of posts today and tomorrow. We are blessed by so many friends and family that I am sure I will leave someone out if I try to send emails or texts. Please set up an RSS reader, or if that sounds like Greek, just check back at this blog and I'll do what I can to keep everyone in the loop.

We had every bit as rough a night as we expected. Somehow knowing the nature of the break intensified the pain some. Plus, after 2am, MA wasn't allowed food or liquid, so no more pain pills. We watched a couple of movies and finally the sun came up.

Sparky is up on the couch (against the rules) but he can't stand it when MA hurts and has to have his head in her lap to comfort her.

I've packed a small bag and we're headed to the hospital about 11am Mountain Time. Medical Center of Aurora - South Campus. We have faith in God and in our surgeon and look forward to a great outcome. Surgery is scheduled at 4:30 by the hospital, but the doctor's scheduler said it would be closer to 1:30. It would be wonderful for herself to feel better before the day is out.

Thank you all for the prayers and support.

Down by the old Millstream

2011-02-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

It's been way too long since I've written; life hasn't been overly easy lately. More on that in future (hopefully soon) posts.

In the 1960s in rural Kentucky, houses had names instead of street numbers. My address growing up was:
Millstream, Newtown Pike
Georgetown, KY 40324

Today, the USPS uses street numbers. And the road I grew up on has been rerouted since 1966 when I started living there. But, I just signed the contract and bought the land! So, even thought we are temporarily in the wilds of Colorado, you can write down 2065 Lemons Mill Rd in your address book as our long term permanent address.
You can see the old house in this shot from the creek from 1980:

We're going to take down that house and build Mary Anne's Barbie dream house on its foundation.

Here's a winter view from the old back deck:
I will enjoy my morning coffee on a new terrace with that view before 2011 is over.

Cousin Berkley was my real estate agent for the purchase. Kim, my architect buddy, has already drawn up preliminary house plans. Cousin Jay is ready for demolition and building once the contract is signed.

It's amazing how life can come full circle.

And the walls come a-tumbling down

2010-09-26T17:17:00.000-04:00

It’s interesting how little we human beings open up to each other naturally, even within families. As you know, we lost our beloved Liza this summer and the tragedy continues to hurt. As with all pain, we search for the silver linings, the things we know that Liza leaves with us even while we don’t get the joy of being with her directly.

Mary Anne and I spent a week with Dunn and Julie and Jordan a few weeks back. The pain is still palpable over there. Dunn was reading CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed, written after Jack’s wife Joy died. CS Lewis describes losing a loved one as being like an amputation. A grieved person may well learn to walk again, but he will always be a one legged man.

But, back to the search for a silver lining. Dunn and I have not always been as close as we could have been. Brothers, certainly, but not anywhere near best friends. Growing up, I found him pesky, obnoxious and loud. And I'm sure he found me distant, arrogant and plenty of other adjectives. But now, I long to be with him. I enjoy the way he uses the things Uncle Hall taught him to do - the elaborateness and zeal of his household projects. I enjoy that he gave me Cardillo sauce (from one of his employees' brother) for me to make pizza. I enjoy watching him learn about dog training. And I am reminded that he is one of the funniest people I have ever met as well as a fabulous story teller. He's clearly a great lawyer - I've never seen a professional community reach out to someone they truly care about like the SC Bar has around Dunn.

Mary Anne spent the week with the three of them while I worked in Denver. She’s always a beautiful presence. That’s a small blessing of my travel job - I can fly to work from anywhere.

Sam the German Shepard is a ray of light in the house.

Mary Anne is the dog whisperer. Love is a puppy chin on your foot or in your lap, and that puppy loves Julie and Dunn and Jordan.

Why do we put walls up? I don’t know who Osho is, but he said “Love and Ego cannot exist together". Being a Hollingsworth, I have done the ego thing very well my whole life. ALL Hollingsworths I know have healthy egos, perhaps not easily leaving all the room we should for showing love. Life is busy, and you never expect the tragedy of the loss of an innocent 10 year old girl. Our priorities in an easy life aren’t always the right ones. These horrible times have to help us find and live the right priorities.

The Dalia Lama says: "To the extent that suffering awakens our empathy and causes us to connect with others, it can serve as the basis of compassion and love." We are all suffering now and need to find these connections. We’re all hurt, but we all have to grow. That’s one of Liza’s legacies for me; it's what she would want.

Dunn, my brother: I love you, Man

Elizabeth Simms Hollingsworth - my niece Liza

2010-07-13T21:50:00.000-04:00

My sister Sophia delivered the eulogy below at the Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church on Saturday July 10, 2010 (also TGP's 73rd birthday). Those of you that know Sophia should imagine her voice and dance movements at the appropriate places. It was beautiful, but as Soph said, she had great material.

Elizabeth Simms Hollingsworth

A long name for a little girl. Liza; that fits better. Sounds kind of quick, bright even. That’s the essence of my Liza.

Quick with a smile.

Quick with a joke.

Quick with a hug.

Quick to say I love you.

Cheery with her funky Chuck Taylors.

Cheery with her love of polka dots.

Cheery with her wonderful drawings.

What a wonderful gift Liza has been in my family’s life. Absolutely the funniest kid I’ve ever met. Watch a movie with her. She will catch the subtle humor and, like her daddy, insert it in a conversation with perfect comedic timing. Last summer Liza and I bought the movie Monsters Inc. We had both seen it a million times but we wanted to see it again. She could mimic the woman/slug thing in it…”I’m watching you Wizouski, always watching….” Hysterical. What Liza didn’t remember is that one of my favorite memories of her is when she was about 3 or 4 years old. Julie, Dunn, Jordan, Liza, Mother, Father, and I met in the North Carolina mountains for a ski weekend. Liza was too young to ski so she and I had spent the day tooling around town – eating ice cream and visiting a cavern. That evening everyone was piled in one room watching Monsters Inc. It was around bedtime but the girls really wanted to watch the rest of the movie so the adoring adults broke curfew. Anyway, at one point, I was lying down on the bed – head at the foot of the bed – and Liza stood in front of me – we were eye to eye. She starts dancing around right in front of me, shaking her hands and her behind saying “Soph-Soph-Soph-Soph.” I looked in her beautiful blue eyes and said “Liza, you need to slow down.” So, at 3, she starts moving in slow motion, still shaking her hands and behind saying “S O P H – S O P H – S O P H.” Hysterical. That’s her humor. That and the 3 Stooges. And SpongeBob.

I was fortunate enough to take the girls to visit Piel and her family in Boston a few weeks ago. We visited Plimouth Plantation. While there we toured a replica of a family village of the native Americans that inhabited that area 300 odd years ago. The staff was all native Americans, dressed in native attire, and performing the same tasks their ancestors did. Liza and I were watching one gentleman (in loin cloth) make a canoe from a truck of a tree. It was really cool. This man was answering questions while he worked. Someone asked him his name. He said Phillip. Liza turned to me, with her beautiful blue eyes, and said “Phillip? Really?” We had a huge chuckle.

A kind, gentle little girl. Eager to try new kinds of food. Eager to make her famous guacamole. Always ready to go swimming, to learn how to surf, to play the guitar, to sit in her mother’s lap, to climb the mulberry tree, go fishing with her daddy, write a nice note, go on the boat with her nana and papa, put a puzzle together, beat Jordan at something, play with her great friend Olivia, listen to Chicken Heart with her grandfather, draw a picture of us, sing a song with her Grandmother. The only kid I know that wanted a gift card to Staples for her birthday! She stole my heart when she admitted that she really does love TAB. My kitchen is a bright candy apple green based on a little star she made me. She said she loved that color and thought it would look good in my kitchen. It’s bright, it’s cheery, it makes me happy. So much like Liza does.

I tell all my nieces that they are each my favorite niece (My favorite niece named “Jordan” or “Eleanor” or “Caroline” or “Lucy” or “Liza”). I usually get – “you’re my favorite aunt.” Period. Liza says “you’re my favorite aunt…named Soph.”

I am fortunate that I got to spend some time with Liza on Saturday. We talked about Cartooning Camp. She loved it! On Sunday I got to tell her I loved her. And the best gift I’ve ever received is she told me “I love you too Soph.” I am the luckiest person in the world.

She loved so many of us. But mostly her sister Jordan, and her parents Dunn and Julie. And she knew they loved her more than anything in the world.

What a phenomenal child. What a gift. What a quick, cheery light in our world. We are lucky to have gotten to spend time with her.

I will love her forever.

As will all of us that knew her. Here are more pictures.

MS Walk 2010

2010-03-08T20:02:00.000-05:00

Hard to believe that it’s been a whole year already since my last post about raising money for the MS walk. It’s been a busy year for us, and one where we haven’t let the disease stop us from doing much of what we want to do.

I’ve switched jobs, and am now a consultant. Especially interesting because I used to joke about them borrowing your watch to tell you what time it was. It’s interesting work and has me in Denver Mon-Thurs most weeks.

MA is doing very well with the time on her own. We don’t like being separated, but we have called on friends as necessary (trips to the airport, etc) and have engaged a regular dog walker. The house is on the market, so we should be able to find something where the master is on the main, even if for a while that’s a rented condo in ATL.

The interferon shots continue weekly and remain as unpleasant as ever. There are some promising drugs on the horizon that do the same thing (slow the progression of the disease) in pill form, but we are never anxious to be the first on a new medication. There is also an interesting new drug to help with walking, and we hope to be talking about that one before the next annual fund-raising post.

On to the solicitation part. I will be walking 5K, probably with Sparky on May 15 in Piedmont Park in Atlanta. It is a very big fundraiser for the National MS Society, and my friends have blessed me each of the last 5 years with very generous donations. This organization is well run, and is dedicated to finding a cure for this debilitating disease. I know times are difficult, but we would appreciate whatever you can give.

MS Walk Page (where you can donate on-line)

Cards and letters always welcome. Tweet us, check us on Facebook, or stop by the place in Atlanta while we’re still there.

Thank you for your support.

Career Transition

2010-02-03T23:39:00.000-05:00

19 years ago this month, I was part of a foursome that started Patient Care Technologies. We spent some time deciding what we were doing, then settled on electronic medical records for home care. We worked with MEDITECH and had Data General build us a then state-of-the-art handheld device.

We were the first system to do clinical documentation for home care. Over the years, we transitioned from the original handheld to laptops then to tablet devices. We switched from DOS to Windows, added a billing module and eventually rewrote the whole system to be process driven - full of business intelligence. We grew from 4 employees to a high of 175. Our original funder and long time stategic partner, MEDITECH, acquired us in April of 2007. As of 12/31/2009, PtCT ceased to exist and we all became MEDITECH employees.

My employment at MEDITECH ended on 1/15/10. It feels very different to me after being part of the same organization for so many years, but it is time to move to something new.

As of 2/1/2010, I am a Senior Consultant with ACS-HCS. I will be building a strategic consulting practice, with a focus on homecare. My first client is the Health at Home department of Centura Health, Colorado's largest health care organization. I am flying out to Denver early on Monday mornings and flying back home on Thursday nights. Less than a week in, it's very exciting.

Cousin Val

2010-01-09T19:11:00.000-05:00

Kent and Betty's oldest, Val, passed away suddenly on Wednesday night at 56 years old. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Mandy, Lucy, Eleanor and Nicholas, as well as Betty, Randolph, Amery, Tish and Wright. The obituary at Milward's describes him well.

Here's Val at the Anniversary Party this summer.

His brother-in-law Rich has started an album of shots as well. He's happy to share electronic or print copies with family who are interested. I've included the taller picture of Val because I was struck by his hands. I always think of Val as working and you can see it in the cuts on his fingers.

Mary Anne and I were watching old home movies of the Kent Hollingsworths growing up around Eclipse Place during one of our recent Lexington visits at Tish's house. Like most home movies, a familiar annual pattern developed with football games, Christmas, swim meets, etc. The striking thing was that Val was always working. He was frequently in the background of the shot, sometimes taking a break (especially to play something with little brother Wright) but always happily doing his chores.

I spent one of my Christmas breaks in high school working for Val. I remember starting early, ignoring the cold and getting a lot done during the days. I never remember anything but joie de vivre from Val, whether showing me how to avoid a manure caked cow's tail while milking, or loading up hay to take out for feeding.

Mary Anne keeps remembering him dancing at Elizabeth's wedding this summer. He pulled Mandy out on the floor during some song that most of us would have figured was only for Elizabeth's generation. He had a golden sunshine of a smile.

We think of Val's namesake, Valentine Hollingsworth, as the first of our family to come to the new World in 1682. People with good names and strong values have been leading the Hollingsworths for a long time.

We don't grieve for Val, we grieve for ourselves. We will miss him every day, and especially when the whole family gets together.

Christmas 2009

2009-12-16T17:06:00.038-05:00

We didn't get a picture of the girls when they were together for the surprise anniversary party in July. And we weren't all together any time except that this year, so we don't have a printed card.

Since we are doing so much digital these days (even stopping delivery of the physical paper in favor of on-line), it feels like an appropriate time to take the Christmas Card digital.

Merry Christmas
Happy New Year for 2010

Now for the fun part, the pictures. Here's a walk down memory lane.

1990 in front of the fireplace in Mt. Pleasant

1990 Christmas dresses

1991 with Frank Harrington at Peachtree Pres

1991 Black Velvet dresses

1992 Christmas dresses

1993 Smocked dresses

1993 Christmas Card

1994 Christmas card

1995 Christmas Card

1997 Christmas Card (with Teddy)

1998 Christmas Card (at Seaside)

1999 Christmas Card (taken by our friend Laurie Coleman)

2000 Christmas Card

2001 Christmas Card

2002 Christmas Card

2003 Christmas Card (at Rosemary Beach)

2004 Christmas Card (Eleanor's high school graduation)

2005 Christmas Card

2005 Family shot

2006 Christmas Card (the laughing version)

2006 Christmas Card

2007 Caroline goes to UK

2008 Christmas Card (Family beach week at Ocean Isle)

A special thanks to Helen D. Bull ("Mrs. Bool") for all the lovely dresses when they were young.

Thanks also to Nancy Cartledge for being organized enough to have some of the older pictures I was missing and communicative enough to have mentioned it before I started trying to gather pictures.

If anyone has a 1996 Hollingsworth Christmas card, let me know.

Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Barding a turkey

2009-11-25T13:20:00.006-05:00

This is a little to long for a facebook post, so I'm putting it on the blog.

We have a lot to be thankful for this year. I'm looking forward to a feast with Muv and Pha and Caroline and we will miss Eleanor (in Chicago).

We have a long tradition of cooking too much food for Thanksgiving, even back to over 20 years ago.

This year we will bard the turkey. It's from Cook's Country (byAmerica's Test Kitchen), as have been many of our recent recipes. It's a 19th century technique where you place salt pork (unsmoked bacon) over the turkey breast as you roast it. I can't wait.

Right now is the fun part. I'm checking the timing on all the recipes and working backwards so I know when to start what. All chefs will tell you, the hardest part is having everything ready at the same time.

Let the preparations begin!

A new day dawns for the dogs

2009-11-21T19:25:00.008-05:00

We've had a few times when Scout has gone into the red zone. She's a little high strung and once she gets agitated, it can get bad. I spent 90 minutes with the trainer this morning and we are beginning dominance training. Which really means that I just need to re-establish that I am alpha and that Mary Anne is second, both of us clearly ahead of the terriers.

Sparky has his part in things too. He is still only 17 months old and sometimes wants to play so badly that it just hurts. He's so cute that we sometimes haven't believed he was culpable.

Dominance training means that they wear their collars and leashes in the house for a time so I can make them do what I require as soon as I require it. Most challenging, no more time on the furniture. We have enjoyed having them curled up beside us on the couch or even draped over a leg on the bed while we watch TV. No more. In doggie world, them being above us physically means they are above us in pack order.

In the end, we'll have better behaved dogs. We can do it and aren't even too sad about it.

Software, but in a good way

2009-10-24T16:16:00.008-04:00

I had a real epiphany on the way into work Friday morning. Morning Edition was already over, and besides, it's the fall fund drive on NPR this week. I still don't have a good iPod connection in the car I'm driving and I'd already heard the CDs that were loaded. iPhone to the rescue. The Public Radio app has an On Demand feature that lets you select various recent broadcasts, without having remembered to subscribe to the Podcasts. I got to hear Garrison Keillor's most recent News from Lake Wobegon the whole way to work. It was great.

I was further inspired by a post by Seth Godin about RadioLand. He advocates subscribing to the podcast, but again, I can get it on demand over the 3G network without spending the time to sync. The on-demand isn't always remembering where I was for a quick restart, but I'm sure that's coming. The point is the steps keep getting easier. I don't have to bother subscribing and downloading and syncing

TiVo has herself watching Andy Cohen and the midnight "Watch what happens Live" show, usually at 9am. We also watch a lot of Graham Norton on BBC America. He's hilarious, and we wouldn't see him as often without the time shifting.

What's the down side? Well, sometimes you discover something just cruising stations and seeing what is on. But I think we more than make up for that by having social-media based recommendations. Netflix does a good job in letting you share movie thoughts with friends. I saw someone I'm following on Twitter ask for movie recommendations the other day - he got dozens of suggestions within a few minutes.

When Eleanor was three, she assumed that that our phone number would follow us wherever we went; now it does via the iPhone in our pockets. When Google first introduced satellite views on the maps, I heard someone complain that the car they could see in their driveway had been sold a few months back. It's amazing how quickly we get over being impressed at how some things work and what we expect technology to be able to do.

Some of what's available now really does make entertainment more entertaining. What will be available soon that our grandchildren take for granted?

GrammarMan

2009-10-01T20:18:00.006-04:00

I probably shouldn't write this one, but I can't help myself. I have a thing about the use of the King's English. My top pet peeve is the extraneous apostrophe between "it" and "s". I feel so strongly about it, I even made a special shirt to be grammar man at the office Halloween 2005.
It's simple really. "Its" is inherently possessive. "It's" is a contraction for "It is".

Enough said. Happy writing.

The Big Red Machine

2009-09-07T14:25:00.021-04:00

I really enjoy watching baseball. It has been a great pleasure to see that passed on to my girls; they love watching baseball as well. My time as a fan has not left me numbered among the long suffering (think Cubs fans); I've had a great couple of runs with teams I followed.

As friends and regular readers will know, I grew up in Central Kentucky, from 1967 to 1980. I became aware enough to really start following baseball in 1970, and of course, the Cincinnati Reds were my team. It was the beginning of a dynasty. An excellent recent Sport Illustrated article asserts that the 1975 Reds were the best hitting team ever. Of course, the name Sparky Anderson comes up here at the house all the time. Game 6 of the 1976 World Series was arguably the best World Series game ever.

College, life, marriage, kids, etc. dimmed my ardor some through the years in Washington (no team) and Charleston (no team). We moved to Atlanta in the spring of 1991, the year the Braves went from worst to first. Two year old Caroline would do the chop from her car seat and every single car that saw her would chop right back at her. The Braves proceeded to win more divisional championships in a row (14) than any other team, to the point where the local fans were bored by the post season. The peak of the Braves "dynasty" was after taking 2 games against the dreaded Yankees in Yankee stadium, coming home needing only 2 of three in Atlanta-Fulton County stadium in October 1996. NYY swept the rest of the series and the Braves haven't really done well since. After these last 4 mediocre seasons (as I write this, the Braves just lost 4 in a row to the Reds, effectively ending their feeble attempt at a Wild Card post season bid), fans here might actually get excited again by a solid season and a pennant race.

The point is, I've been privileged to live near and follow a dominant team twice in my life; you can't ask for much better than that.

Back to the Big Red Machine.

In those days, only occasional weekend games were on TV. You can bet I was in the basement watching the big color TV for those games (with the adjustable antenna set North to get WLW). I fell asleep on summer nights listening to Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall. Marty did a 15 minute "Star of the game" segment after every game. If we won, it was the most important Reds player from that game. If the other team won (didn't happen much - the Reds won 100 games almost every year), we got to listen to the 2nd most significant player from the other team (the other radio team got the most important one). Then Joe did a 15 minute wrap up of games around the league - the "10th inning show". It was finally time to go to sleep when Joe said "this is the old lefthander rounding third and heading for home" at the end of the broadcast.

I only learned while writing this piece that Nuxhall was the youngest major league player in the modern era. In 1944, with many of the regular players in the war, 15 year old Joe pitched 2/3s of an inning, giving up 5 earned runs for an ERA of 65.2. He came back 8 years later for a strong career, then retired to the broadcast booth in 1967, just before I started listening.

Dr. Brown and TGP took us to Crosley Field when we were pretty young, so I don't remember it much. I do remember that Dr. B. dropped a foul ball that Willie Mays hit, and it bounced away, lost forever.

Every Spring in the 70s in Georgetown, TGP would fill out the order form from Graves Cox and get tickets for several games, usually including at least 1 double header (back in those days, they really played 2 back to back games and you were guaranteed 18 innings of baseball). We sat way up in the cheap seats, on the third base side so we could see in the Reds dugout. The ride up I-75 was always eventful. We usually went with the Browns, so it was TGP & Kendall, me and Kevin and Dunn and Jeff. We had various overpasses that we would pretend Indians were hiding behind and shooting at us from (there was no such thing as political correctness then). Sometimes, we'd stop and eat at the rest stop before the last downhill in KY. Kevin usually had some extraordinary concoction of a sandwich - cream cheese and pineapple or peanut butter and banana. Sometimes, we'd go straight to downtown and have a meal at a pancake restaurant (I always got the Pig in a Blanket) above our underground parking.

Once inside Riverfront, we'd get some popcorn (despite the grown ups attempts to have us already fed by then), mostly to convert the container into a megaphone so we could cheer the team along. Coke cups, quickly emptied, were for popping; they made quite a sound when we stomped on them. Kevin and I would run a full circle around the stadium, dodging crowds the whole way. That's one thing those old baseball/football round stadiums would do that the new "old" parks don't. Herself and I went to Yankee Stadium last summer before they dropped it; you can't run a full circle around that one either.

It wasn't only us and the Browns. I went to the game several times with Red and his father Milt. The best time was when we went up US-25 in the convertible Pontiac. What a beautiful day. Kim has always viewed having a ragtop as a necessity in life.

Riverfront went the way of all good flesh a few years ago, replaced by the Great American Ball Park, which Kim's architecture firm built. That let the GBBN folks play the last game in Riverfront (or Cinergy) before it was dropped.

We had a reunion of sorts at the Great American Ballpark in the summer of 07. It was so hot during our Sunday afternoon game that we went up a section to find some shade.

(Jeff, Kendall, Caroline, Eleanor, TGP)

Great view of the river from the new stadium.

Beisbol been bery, bery good to me!

Happy Birthday

2009-08-22T17:43:00.023-04:00

We recently celebrated our good friend Andrew's 50th birthday. It still feels surprising to be old enough to have 50 year old friends and to be approaching it myself.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought this essay would be my first 5 figure word count. Watching our home movies, the only reliable scene each year is the blowing out of the candles on a birthday cake. Even though that's always in the videos, I don't neglect the stills. I really end up more comfortable with the still shot than the video; perhaps it's because our pictures are always doing a slide show on the monitor in the kitchen and we get to see them all the time. Anyway, I've got some good birthday cake pictures.

Here are some fancy store-bought wedding cakes, both for M&F's original in 1960 and the anniversary party this summer.

And of course, the wedding of the century in 1983.

For a bridge party early after we moved to the ATL, MA made a cake with edible flowers. Really.

But I digress - back to birthday cakes.
Eleanor's first birthday cake was a replica of what Granny Pearl used to make for Mary Anne - pound cake, pink icing and animal crackers.

Caroline is so cute at sister Sophia's 29th that it doesn't matter that the cake was a store bought from Rhodes Bakery. They did do a good job with their cakes, however.

By the late teens, the girls started making the cakes, and they got pretty artistic.

Mrs. Majors made a Humpty Dumpty for Eleanor's 16th:

Eleanor made a cake that looked like the Mercury Villager minivan for Caroline's 15th:

Elmo was Eleanor's 17th:

We had a dinasour/beach theme for boyfriend Bill's 20th:

This one may be my favorite. Bill made a cake that looked like Sparky for Caroline's 20th:

He ain't heavy, he's my brother

2009-08-19T17:24:00.003-04:00

Hollingsworth men love machinery.

Brother Dunn actually sent me this picture. Julie suggests he was at his law partner's farm. I still assume he was only allowed sit in the cab while someone else held the keys.

The suprise 49th Anniversary Party

2009-07-07T20:35:00.014-04:00

We always get the whole family together at the Creek by Jay's on the fourth.
Having July 4th on a Saturday, and it being the summer of the 49th anniversary of Muv and TGP's nuptials, we couldn't resist the surprise party on Friday the 3rd.

It's difficult to surprise a woman who can't sit still, but MA and I, together with Kim and Sarah and Nancy and Ken, kept her just busy enough to not be suspicious of our 7:30 dinner reservations at Spindletop.

When we finally got them walking together enough to open the door, over 100 of their nearest and dearest were there to surprise them.

All of my out of town cousins made it to Lexington, except Wright, who's in Norway. We had M&F's friends from Pinehurst, UofC med school, Yale and various Navy posts. What a testament to people's love for them.

For those of you who really want to see all the pictures, try cousin Rich's gallery. If you're on Facebook, Anne Wheeler Hollingsworth posted a bunch of great creek pictures.

Daughter Eleanor, in the tradition of Muv herself, presented a lovely poem:

How They Met
7/3/2009

Twas the summer before his senior Yale year
In auditions for Carousel he had nothing to fear
And how could he know such a small summer play
in Lexington no less could have brought every one of us here today?

In a role he was cast
In the ensemble she sang
She was instantly someone he couldn't look past
Clad in bright orange shorts she waltzed in with a bang

But this story my friend, is not over yet
these two are still strangers who've barely just met
His Hollingsworth swagger gained him no ground
And his first request was quite quickly turned down

Our hero, thank goodness, determined not to be dismayed
And he hurried onward in his quest, and would not be way-laid
As for Alice, she was either now smitten
Or knew he'd keep trying

So, ... as sure as I've written
She accepted his second request to go dining
The pair headed out to Jerry's diner
At this point of our story things couldn't be finer

That is until Vertrees got a look at the prices
In his own classy style, all he could buy was hot cheese and two bread slices
They split one grilled cheese
and more than one laugh(ter)
Conversed with such ease
the first hint of happily ever after

Their summer and courtship whizzed right on by
But not before she got pinned by her guy
Just like the musical that started it all
by the time school started back in the fall

They'd gone from "June is bursting out all over" to "You'll never walk alone"
Two young loves had found a life long home

Isn't it easy, these five decades later
to see that this pair has made all our lives greater

As the story goes "Mother bent over and Father fell in love"
So because of some bright orange shorts, she's got four grown children that all call her Muv

Thanks to Spindletop (and Steve and Tish, whose name we used) as well as special thanks to party planner sister Sophia.

A good time was had by all.

Morelock

2009-06-27T20:05:00.020-04:00

Another of Kent's letters, this one from almost 16 years ago. I love the stories about TGP as a young boy, especially around the dining room table at the Hollys.
My favorite Hollys dining room table story, from the same era as this post, goes as follows:

There was company at the table and Kent and Donn and Hall told Polly that Vert had a story. Everyone got quiet and TPG told his story: "Do you know how to catch a polar bear? Cut a hole in the ice. Put peas all around the hole. When the bear comes up to take a pea, kick him in the ice hole"

Still a good joke 70 years later.

Kent Hollingsworth
November 16, 1993

Dear Wright:

Morelock, blind and bedridden for some 10 years, died Sunday at 91. Dorcas called and asked if we would share a floral spray. Oh, my yes. There would be a visitation Tuesday at Kerr Brothers Funeral Home on Main Street. We will get there as soon as I get out of class and return from Louisville.

With artificial coloring, she appeared rigid, stern, cold, lifeless-of course. The image I recalled so readily from more than a half-century ago was of a tall, strong, gentle woman whose beauty was in her smile, her warmth, her caring, her zest for life.

Morelock's sister Mary, 79, a nurse burdened all these years with supernumerary patients at home, laughed her sister's laugh in greeting us: "Vertrees called long distance, and we talked for 15 minutes, but I never did get to tell him that story she loved so..."

Vertrees had his second birthday in Morelock's house at The Hollys.

Father had that house (Ed note: Whitlock's house, not the Hollys pictured above [with 3 year old Vertrees on the back deck]) built on the Carrick Pike (now known as Stone Road) at the back of the farm. It was the standard Combs Lumber Co. tenant house: white clapboard frame, four small rooms on the first floor, unfinished second floor under a hip roof; it was heated by a coal stove in the living room, wood stove in the kitchen; no electricity, no plumbing, privy in the backyard; whole deal cost $2,500; well drilling and hand pump out back were extra.

Big Jim Whitlock, a born offensive lineman, had leased the farm for 13 years from Ted Bassett's grandmother before Father bought the 126 acres from her for $20,000 in 1939-$10,000 down, with the $10,000 balance to come, in Father's usual term, “60-90 days." In this instance, the period extended several years after the seller's death, driving Ted's mother to distraction trying to collect.

Father asked Mr. Whitlock to stay on and manage the operation for him, raise the tobacco and hay, help him stock the place with registered black Angus cattle, purebred Dorsett sheep, Duroc hogs, Plymouth Rock laying hens, Toggenburg goats, Silver pheasants, exotic white turkeys, and tumbling pigeons that would strut around the garden house roof and tumble off backward onto a startled peacock which screeched that the sky was falling.

Father agreed to build the house for Mr. Whitlock in the back pond field so he, his wife (Vertrees reduced Mr. Whitlock to "Lock" and when confronted with Mrs. Whitlock, designated her "Morelock"), and their 16-year-old son Jay (a Jim junior, he hardly could be called Little Jim because he was three inches taller than Big Jim, and a diminutive name just could not be fixed to a huge center, "The best basketball player I ever saw in Scott County," proclaimed Coach Adolph Rupp, who raised Herefords farther down the Carrick Pike) could live there.

The Whitlocks moved into the tenant house and Father started remodeling the main residence, the north wing of which was said to have been built in 1806, the main portion with the Greek Revival Doric pillars and portico added by Lexington builder John McMurty in 1845, when Dr. Wm. Addison Smith married Julia Coulter and got the land as a wedding gift from her father David.

During this remodeling, Father and Mother stayed in town at the Lafayette Hotel (now the Urban—County Government Building at Main and Martin Luther King Streets). Rather than drive back to Lexington for lunch, Father wondered if Morelock could cook lunch for us. Well, her dining room was too small to seat Big Jim, Jay, Father, Mother, baby Vertrees, and sundry siblings.

Father thought the new tenant house was too hot in the summer anyway, so he added a 15-foot screened-in back porch that ran the length of the house, incorporating the hand pump (which pleased Morelock, having access to pump water under roof). Wafted by soft summer breezes on the new porch, we enjoyed not just light lunches, but great, grand, immemorial noonday feasts prepared by Morelock.

You like custard pie? Three big ones came the next day, each quartered (Mother always cut eight skimpy slices out of a pie). You like pumpkin pie? Three big ones the next day, dozen slices, only 10 people on hand--how about a second piece? Biscuits were large and luscious, three inches in diameter, two inches high. Mother always had those silver-dollar sized biscuits, too hard to be opened by hand, too easy to crumble when pried by a knife. Morelock’s were hot, light, ready for her peach preserves-you better take two of those before they get cold. Mashed potatoes and cream gravy, homemade applesauce with cinnamon on top, three pork chops. Pass that bowl of string beans over to him. Who is ready for some more ears of corn? No wonder Big Jim Whitlock was big.

Then the smell from the kerosene lamps Mr. Whitlock read by got to Father. He had the house wired, overhead lighting put in every room, plus wall plugs. This pleased Morelock, who inveigled Mr. Whitlock into buying one of those new electric toasters

(Ed Note: Herself has always loved toasters. See the picture of the non-pop up, then the newfangled version that Morelock enjoyed)
that popped out toast before it burned-no more peering into the oven every so often. The new gadget had been invented by a guy named Genter in Minnesota, who died without suspecting his wife would win the Kentucky Derby with Unbridled.

When Mother and Father left, Vertrees and I got to spend the night at Morelock's house. She had a great brass bed upstairs with a feather mattress that enveloped us; one did not sleep on this mattress, but in it. On such nights, Morelock would sit in front of the coal stove, under the new light in the living room, with Vertrees in her lap and read to him. Vertrees liked one particular story - it was a nothing story, something about a cow in the barn asking how the weather was out there, and the horse says it's too cold, the sheep says it's too hot, the chick-chick says somebody could drown out there, while the duck says it's just Great - and Morelock had to read and reread this same dumb story to him every night.

When Mother and Father returned, Vertrees and I went back to our regular beds and meals. We all gathered around the long dining room table and talked to rather than with each other. Father wants to tell about the big oil deal he made in Indiana, Dorcas tries to find out how she and the other cheerleaders are going to get to the next game, Mother wants to explain something about Robert Sherwood’s new play, while Donn and Hall are arguing over who is going to get the station wagon to drive to town. Under this babble, Vertrees-he‘s about three-stares at his plate and mumbles to himself. Mother notices. What is he saying, Denzil? Father leans close to Vertrees; he cannot make it out. Hold it. Hold it! Everybody quiet down. Now, son, what were you saying?

With head down, Vertrees continues to read his plate, reciting a narrative I recognized, about a cow in a barn asking about the weather. He had the thing down verbatim, even with pauses where Morelock turned the pages. When he got to the cat‘s final line, "So you see, all people do not like the same kind of weather my—dear," he raised his head, grinning in triumph to a stunned audience. The Bible notwithstanding, Mother pronounced it the Greatest Story Ever Told. Could Vertrees do that again? He nodded, and proceeded to read it right off his plate, exactly as before my—dear. Later he took to memorizing lines from Carousel and married Alice.

When the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, Jay immediately enlisted in the Marines, Mr. Whitlock took a job guarding the ammo dump at Richmond, Ky., and Morelock was left alone. I visited her a lot, read in her saved copies of the Ladies Home Journal Daphne du Maurier's serialized Frenchman's Creek in one afternoon’s sitting in the privy. Then Hall was inducted right out of U High and was shipped overseas for the Normandy invasion. Donn housed the tobacco and enlisted to become a drill sergeant. Dorcas went off to Sophie Newcombe College in New Orleans. Father was gone most of the time, reopening a coal mine near London, Ky., and putting down some shallow oil wells around Albany, Ky. So nobody was left to milk the cows and clean the chicken houses, except Vertrees and me. Morelock closed her house and moved over with us. This permitted Mother to travel with Father more often, leaving us in Morelock's loving care.

Travel was rare with gas rationing. Everybody who owned a car initially was entitled to an "A" sticker and four gallons a week, good for about 60 miles. Because he was an oil producer "related to the war effort," Father was entitled to a "C" sticker and all the gas he needed for the 1942 Studebaker he was stuck with for the duration. When I was 15, Father averred I was a year older so I could get a driver's license, and drive myself to U High, saving a gallon a day. I had a trucker‘s "T" sticker for our 1942 Chevy pickup and enough gas for seven trips a week to town; two-a-day meant one less trip on the weekend.

Andy Deiss and I happened upon two of the 3,300 tickets for the UK—Cincinnati basketball game in old Alumni Gym. This required two quick trips, hurrying home from school after our basketball practice to milk the cows, then hustling back to meet Andy at 7:30 in front of Alumni Gym. Snow began swirling when I dashed from the shower at U High, but it was not sticking and of no consequence, really, for the tread still showed on the pre-war tires, and I had the confidence of Eddie Rickenbacker at the wheel of that racy pickup.

But I had no weight in the back, and slipped a bit wide around the elbow at the old Cool Meadow Airport (now Fasig-Tipton Sales). I had to flip the wheel this way, then that, then this way, and sped on-—can I handle this snow, or what? The 35-mile—per—hour Victory speed limit was not in effect on the Newtown Pike, not for Toad, Master of the Road, 40, 45, 50, 55, SIXTY. Go Big Blue—-here I come!

Slashing through the blizzard, past what is now Walter Zent‘s farm, then C.M. Boone's place, where there is a slight left bend and an exhilarating bump, that old Chevy took flight. We landed in the righthand ditch, and hurtled down the fence line, taking out a row of hackberry saplings Chuck Schmidt never missed when he bought that frontage 35 years later.

The pilot was ejected through the windshield and did not regain consciousness until after some very nice people who lived in New Zion took him the rest of the way home. I awoke on the front hall floor as Morelock was protesting Mother's trying to pour a hot toddy through my blood-caked lips. My rescuer had reported that I had pert near froze to death lying in the road there so long, and recommended that I be given some inside heat. Morelock said that liquor would get all the blood flowing again. Mother asked no one in particular if an ambulance ever would come. It would not. A train wreck in Lexington blocked traffic on Georgetown, Third, and Fourth Streets, causing the ambulance driver to give up hope of ever making it out the Newtown Pike; he took another call.

Father was in New Orleans at the Fairgrounds with Kendor and the Studebaker. I had totally destroyed our only other means of transportation. Mother called Howard Evans at Winton, where Dr. Bill McGee now lives, and he warmed up his gold Desoto and drove to The Hollys. Morelock and Mr. Evans carried me down the icy front steps and muscled me into the backseat.

We started back to town. Police stopped us at the scene of a terrible wreck, a smashed pickup truck lying on its side and blocking most of the road. Mr. Evans advised the officer that we had to get by, taking a sick boy to the hospital in Lexington. The patrolman sniffed. You people been drinking? Mr. Evans was indignant: Absolutely not! A wrecker pulled up, ready to winch the junk out of the road, and the patrolmen waved us on, out of the way.

Mr. Evans had an unusual mannerism to, indicate his amusement. Without dislodging his omnipresent cigarette, he would hiss twice, and his eyes would twinkle. As he drove toward Lexington, Mr. Evans hee-heed, "Well, Polly, you almost got your boy to town in a paddy wagon, on a DUI charge".

The funeral parlor was filled with people Missy and I did not know. Is Jay here? He had returned from the South Pacific heavier, older, and with a different agenda. He was not interested in going to college and putting up with Coach Rupp's caustic comments. He had a beer, got a job as a fireman, played cards at the stationhouse, on—three off—two, played basketball with Dean's Wreckers, a nationally ranked AAU team, and played semi—pro baseball. He had lost a stride, but none of his athletic grace; and he played shortstop on the local pickup team chosen as foils when Bob Feller’s Major League All Stars toured through Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler's town after the war.

I had not seen Jay for more than 20 years. I read that he: had been seriously injured when a car rammed into the ladder—extension trailer Jay was steering, but I was not permitted to visit him in intensive care after plastic surgeons put him back together. I did not recognize him at Kerr's, until he grinned. He rose slowly from a chair. His left; leg was bowed and he was five inches shorter, but his big meat hand was strong and warm as ever.

Jay, Mary asked, what was-that story your Mother always liked to tell about Vertrees? Lot of 'em. I mean about feeding his kitten? Oh, the one about his using Mrs. Hollingsworth's finest china. Yes, that's it. Mary laughed and turned to us “Your father had some very important investors down here for the Kentucky Derby and he was trying to sell them some horses or something, and your Mother was serving dessert in these very special little bowls, and Vertrees--he was very little and never said much- pulled on this man's arm and said, "You know you're eating out of my cat's dish." And Jay grinned, and Mary laughed Morelock's laugh.

It happened so long ago, people and things so important to me, yet almost forgotten, so I thought I would set it down, lest you miss knowing of an earlier era that bore on yours.

You have all our love,
Father (Kent)

Mr. Wright Hollingsworth
921 Stephens Avenue
Missoula, Montana 59801

Copy to Uncle Vertrees, and around

I asked TGP what the name of that story was yesterday. Here is his response:
That is a story I used to tell visitors at The Hollys when I was 4, during the war. I have no idea as to its origin, but it was a long shaggy dog tale. that your grandmother loved to repeat as an example of her youngest's brilliance. I remember Father saying "don't let the boy start that silly thing again" when we were driving somewhere. I would stand on the transmission hump in the back of the car and regale them with stories while leaning over their back seat. No wonder they have seat belts now. I think it was the expansion and extensiveness of the number of animals brought into the story that would get to Father.

Eclipse Place Cattle Roundup

2009-06-14T13:58:00.013-04:00

This story is over 15 years old, but it still makes me smile. The Hollys is pictured in earlier stories. Cousin Tish has movies of Eclipse Place during the move in described below; the kitchen floor was dirt on that first day. And as those of us that spent the night on the farm will recall, that sulfur water smell was much more persistent that Uncle Kent's story would imply.

KENT HOLLINGSWORTH
ATTORNEY AT LAW

June 13, 1994

Dear Val and family:

Have at hand your April recollection of cattle roundups at Eclipse Place
and the want of real cowhands. Apparently, this was occasioned by Tish's letter indicating she was excited about a man who fools with cattle.
(Ed Note: Uncle Kent means Steve)

Quite possibly you and I have the most vivid memories of separating our Black Angus from the Rawdons' by affixing chain tags in the upper barn, because the girls were too young to participate in a material way.

In 1962, we were city dwellers with a pretend farm on the side--Dorcas and Jeff's 50 acres at the end of the blacktop on Beacon Hill Road—where our first horse, Aristides, grazed with the colossal Calico.

In our tiny city house, we were cramped. When we built it in 1956, it was adequate, 700 square feet on the first floor, with two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. In 1957 Randolph arrived, requiring that you and she share a 10x12 bedroom, which was do-able. In 1961, however, Amery's crib and the twin beds left precious little floor space for maneuver.

Then, too, we were making up things for you to do. We signed up for Little League baseball, Cub Scouts, choir; we made you walk all the way home, 2.2 miles, from University School with Randal--contrived devices to keep city children busy and away from pioneer television.
Hey, we have to get out of town! We have to move to the country where there are some real things to do, where our children can grow up learning the value of physical endeavor. We need to teach them, show them how to work, let them realize monetary gain from work commensurate with the quality of work devoted to a project. We needed more space, physically and mentally.

In the spring of 1963, Dorcas and Jeff sold their town- farm and moved to The Hollys. Mother and Father gave Dorcas the house and yard outright; for the rest of the farm, Jeff paid off the $20,000 mortgage and agreed to give the tobacco income to Mother and Father for their lives. Father then had no place to graze his Black Angus.

In June of 1963, Tish arrived; but there was no room for her. We had to build a wing on the tiny house in town, or move to a big old house in the country. Dick Compton showed us several farms in Scott County, but none of them would do. Talked with Joe Mainous and his sapient partner, Dan Midkiff, who had been in the business of trading horses and farms for more than a half-century.

Mr. Midkiff said he thought Floyd Clay might be ready to trade a little farm above Georgetown he had traded Francis MacKenzie for a year earlier. Francis was the farm manager at Castleton Farm and had fixed up his farm, just a little bit, with plank fence and a few sheds as a quarantine farm for saddlebred mares shipped in to breed to Castleton stallions.

Floyd Clay was the oddball grandson of Cassius M. Clay, known as the Lion of White Hall because he was a sturdy 6-foot-3 and roared a lot; he also was undefeated as a Bowie -knife fighter; further, he was rich, and an abolitionist, all of which set him apart from the Madison County set. During the Civil War, President Lincoln appointed Cassius Clay ambassador to Russia--where he met the ballerina who became Floyd's grandmother.

Anyway, Floyd Clay (the Clay of Clay-Wachs Stockyards) liked to trade as much as Mr. Midkiff did: "Now Floyd," Mr. Midkiff began the negotiations on my behalf, "this young man here has been trained in the law, but he doesn't know much about trading farms, so I've come along to settle things, like--now, Floyd, we'd appreciate your leaving the light bulbs in the barns; and I'm hoping you'll not take the gates with you just because they're not fixed to the land the way the gate posts are..."

"But now Dan, I'm atakin' them sheep racks in the upper barn because Ben Ford bought them off the warehouse floor to feed our sheep we're raising on shares, and... I don't believe the young man will need them gates, because he's never said nothin' about havin' any stock..."

This went on a hour or so, Mr. Midkiff smiling, Mr. Clay frowning, my not saying anything, until it was agreed that Mr. Clay would take our little house in town valued at $20,000, we would take the 67 acres in Scott County valued at $1,000 an acre, we would assume Mr. Clay's $20,000 mortgage on the farm with Equitable, Mr. Clay would take a $25,000 second mortgage on the farm payable by us in five years, and then came the tricky part--Mr. Midkiff demanded $2,000 to boot. Mr. Clay wrote out a check and handed it to me without a word.

In reviewing this terribly informal "closing", it seemed to me that I owed Mr. Clay $2,000, rather than the other way around, but Mr. Midkiff shook his head. He said Floyd Clay wrote out the check quickly because he figured he was getting the best of it, making off with those sheep racks, and fully intending to steal all the tobacco sticks, which were never mentioned. Mr. Midkiff grinned, said it was a good trade, both sides confident they had beaten the other out of something.

So, on October 15, 1963, we unloaded all our furniture from 1,050 square feet of 1 1/2 floors in town, and we lost it in the expanse of 4,200 square feet plus portico in the country; came to one chair, or one table, per room. On that very same day, however, Uncle Hall, Aunt Becky, Bryan, Leigh, and Berkeley arrived from Florida with two truckloads of furniture. That filled the house. Then Father shipped over his Black Angus and they filled the fields.

Saw Francis MacKenzie at a Farm Managers Club meeting and he said he had heard I had taken up his old place above Georgetown. Good water, he said. Used to be a dairy farm, had to have constant water, you know, for dairy cows. Back in 1934, that dry spell? The dug well commenced to going dry, you know, so they had to drill for water. The dug well goes down 45 feet, you know. They drilled right next to it, went down 97 feet as I recall, put the pump on the drilled well. If you mind the sulfur—only taste it every now and then—why all you have to do is switch that pump over to the old dug well, which aerates that sulfur outta there. Good farm. Not much border fencing though.

That last casual comment was critically true. We could not keep Father's cattle in, and we could not keep the Rawdons' cattle out, because of all the breaks in and tramp-downs of the rusty wire that may have been a serviceable border fence 40 years earlier.

In August of 1960, we all went down to Kentucky Lake
where Ralph Broadbent put up a raucous bunch from Yale and Scott County due in the area for the marriage of his daughter Alice to a guy named Vertrees, Vuttree—how'd anybody come on a name like that? Mr. Broadbent was very close—-by a nose, surely no farther back than a head margin --to being as fine a man you would ever want to meet.

By and by, Vertrees and Alice were out of med school, into the Navy, having Eben and Sophia, and thinking about getting out of the Navy to stamp out disease in Scott County. At the same time, grandfather Broadbent was having some heart problems, and began thinking about selling his farms in Western Kentucky, and relocating his insurance office in Lexington, where he and grandmother (Ed Note: Bebe) would be closer to the grandchildren.

So one hot day in 1965, the nicest person in the world was in the neighborhood, checking out kindly old Doctor Ken Brown, and he turned up the driveway at Eclipse Place just to say hello. He arrived amid tumult. Little children (Tish was two, Amery four) were jumping up-and-down on the second-floor porch and screaming about something; Randolph came running from her piano, slamming the hall door; Val and I collided trying to get out of the library door; your mother came out of the kitchen to greet the visitor; everybody was shouting now--They're loose! They're heading up this way from the creek! Grandfather's are over there!

What? Where? What!! Can I help? asks the wide-eyed greatest guy of all time. He takes off his hat and puts that on the seat of his car; he figures he does not have time to take off his coat or loosen his tie, because everybody else is running off somewhere. What can I do?

Why, hi there Ralph, good to see you. Oh, nothing much going on here. Just that the Rawdons have moved their wild black cattle down from their hill farms to their farm next door here, and they've run through the fence again. We'd like to keep them separated from Father's cattle. Which is no big deal: all we have to do is drive Father's cattle into the upper barn, close the door on them, then whoop-and-holler the wild ones back through the hole in the fence.

Ralph nodded, keeping to himself reservations about the ease with which the bunch of cattle that was stampeding by the yard fence—kicking, snorting, making loud noises--how this wild bunch could be kept separate from the mild bunch. They all were black.

Dammit! Who left that gate open? Alerted by the question, the Rawdon cattle veered, spotted the opening, and galloped into the barn field. There, Father's cattle casually lifted their heads to see what the commotion was about; uncomprehending who, what, or why, they became terrified. They turned and ran. Slowly. The Rawdon cattle dashed through them, caught them up in the excitement of the chase, and a massed bunch of some 40 black cattle raced around the barn field.

Boy, they all look wild now, hard to tell ours from theirs. Ralph nodded. Val said Grandfather's cattle all had neck chains and number tags. Randolph pointed out that several heifers had yellow paint on them. Val explained that meant they were stockyard cattle and must belong to the Rawdons, because Grandfather had bred all his. Ralph noted that distinction, but wondered about those with red ear tags. Val said they must be Grandfather's, because nobody in the world could have caught any of the Rawdon cattle and held them long enough to get a tag through an ear. Ralph nodded.

Let's just let them run around for a while, play themselves out. Then we'll drive them slowly by the upper barn there: Val, you and Randolph step in there, raise your arms, give them a little hoya-hoya, and cut out Grandfather's cattle. Ralph, you just stand there at the barn door; we don't want you to be running around with a bad heart. Ralph nodded. When Val and Randolph cut out Grandfather's, you just roll that big door back, then slam it close when Grandfather's cattle mosey into the barn. Okay?

Well, we circled that barnfield about 88 times, mostly jogging, stumbling a lot, shouting at cattle, Randolph, and Ralph—Open it! Now! Not Now! Close it! Aw, you let him get away...There's one, red tag! Aw...Amery and Tish, sitting on the fence, giggled from time to time.

After about an hour of running and shouting, we finally got them separated. The Rawdon cattle slowed to a walk, but they were ready to break for another run around the field if anybody made any sudden moves. Well, let's just look in the barn and count what we have in there--supposed to have 19.

Ralph rolled back the big old door one more time. We all peered in. The barn was empty. The door at the far end of the barn was open. Val walked through the barn, shaded his eyes from the hot sun as he scanned the horizon. There they are, Val reported, they must have tramped down the fence in the back field, because they're all over at the Rawdons' now.

Ralph nodded. Dust, moistened by sweat, streaked his face. Scampering cattle coming off fresh grass had splattered his shirt and trousers with green glob. Early on he had removed his coat and tie; he retrieved these relatively clean items from the fence, neatly folded them over a filthy arm, and said he guessed he'd be going now.

Ah, life down on the farm. But that was long ago. Now Missy still is in France, working on stories for the Thoroughbred Times and Town & Country. Uncle Donn called, invited me to Hopewell Church, where yesterday he performed the "laying on of hands" and formally ordained both Randal and Jay as Church Elders.

Holly was there, said she had been talking to Guy Graves recently about the famous trip to Saratoga for Heather Whitney's party. She related how you and she drove up in the blue mirage that was your Merce sports coupe, carrying the French edition of The Blood-Horse, and were stopped by a flashing blue light.

Where you going so fast? Saratoga. Of course. Who's the cute thing there you're taking across state lines? My cousin. Right. She over 21? Not yet. Oke Kay. What else you got? Some French magazines. Right. What are you going to do with them? Take them to the race track for promotional distribution. Okay buddy, how about stepping out here so we can sort this thing out...

Graffiti

2009-05-25T17:08:00.009-04:00

The former elementary school nearby had a playground which was one of the dog's favorites.

The city of Atlanta public schools has decided to use that space, so they have Winter Construction busy making a kindergarten for Morris Branden Elementary right now. Hopefully, that will help boost property values.

Last fall, I noticed that we were getting some graffiti on the Winter Construction sign. I was walking the dogs every morning and at least some evenings at that point. I would see it almost every night, but it was ALWAYS gone by the next morning. I became intrigued because it reminded me of the chapter about the New York subway in The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. The subway authority cleaned the cars EVERY night, until the graffiti artists finally gave up.

The folks at Winter Construction must have read that book, I thought. I was even on the lookout for the truck that had the new signs. It must be expensive to put new signs out every night, but what a statement it was making. I was looking for the manager of the construction project to compliment him on his perseverance.

I mentioned this whole pattern to Mary Anne and got her to come on the walk with me one evening. Sure enough, there was the graffiti again. As always, it was the same symbol. Kind of a sideways "V", with a vertical line through it. I didn't know what gang that represented, but it had to be something, despite the fact that this really isn't a neighborhood full of gangs. Anyway, when she looked at it, MA said "What graffiti?". We walked closer so she could see it better. Then she said "That's the shadow of the street sign caused by the street light".

The angle from this light

through this sign

leaves this shadow

As herself says, I'm a freakin' genius.

The Bucket Test

2009-05-09T19:04:00.011-04:00

Buckets can be used for a lot of things. The girls used to think they were great hats.

It must have stuck with me, because when I interview people, I give them "The Bucket Test". I borrowed it from Die Hard 3. It has 2 correct answers, so it's interesting to see if people can get them both. I have even taken to giving homework of the second answer if an interviewee does well enough with the first answer.

As I phrase it, the question goes like this:
"I'm going to give you two buckets, a three gallon bucket and a five gallon bucket. They are both empty. You've got all the water you can use. I want you to give me back precisely four gallons."
Herself is by now very tired of the way I say "precisely" whenever this gets discussed at home.

Most of my daughters' boyfriends have had to take the bucket test. As with the job interviews, mostly I'm just watching to see how folks react to a difficult question.

Before tonight, I had last looked up this problem on the internet a few years ago, and didn't really find anything. By now, like everything else, it's on Answers.COM. No clicking that link if you ever want to work for me (or date my daughters).

Once you've figured out (or cheated using the link above) the first way, just start again, filling the other bucket first. The second answer needs to take the same number of steps as the first answer. Let me know if you need some help.

Teddy Shapou and the three day pack of cigarettes

2009-04-04T14:19:00.020-04:00

I first told this story to Mary Anne on June 26th, 1980, the night we met. She had been showing me around the Navy base on our first day in Charleston and we ended up sitting on her front porch with me telling funny stories trying to impress her.

This is my favorite piece of family lore, and one of the reasons I started this blog. Kent wrote this rendition of the story to his son Val in 1994. Vertrees is, of course, TGP. Ken is good old Dr Brown. The two of them later became partners in a medical practice at St. Lukes in Georgetown (see TGP's autobiography)

The closest picture to 1955 that I have is from 1959 below. Left to right are: Hall, Denzil (Grandfather), Vert, Donn, Kent

KENT HOLLINGSWORTH
ATTORNEY AT LAW

May 15, 1994

Dear Val:

School is out. I finished grading final exams on Tuesday. Now I am vacationing for three months and am free to do all the little things I have postponed, odd projects set aside until I had more time, like checking the spelling of the name of a predecessor in title to our property. This was a 15-minute job, and I stepped off briskly toward the court house. Got to flipping through old deed books, reading wills, drawing plats of parcels beginning at a point in the centerline of the Crawfish Pike and running thence South 13 1/2 degrees East for 31.6 poles and 16 links... until the county clerk came into the vault and advised it was closing time. Good grief, I had spent the whole day in there! I scooted right home. Missy wanted to know where in the in the world I had been. Oh, I had to pick up some pipe. What?! Casing, actually..

Family tradition of the 15-minute job began about 40 years ago. (Ed note: 1954) Your Uncle Donn was setting tobacco at The Hollys

and we were all standing around talking about how dry it was. Without irrigation, the plants would surely die. Your Grandfather posed a rhetorical question: Whatinhell are you standing around for? There's plenty of water in Elkhorn Creek, and a culvert down there near the mailbox, so you can run a line under the road right into this field.

Right. But it'll cost a couple of thou to buy the pipe. Tell ya what, Grandfather offered: Hall pulled that No. 9 well last year, and there's about 2,000 feet of casing just lying there on the Albany lease. You can have it for nothing. Just drive down there and pick it up.

The quick response to this was that we did not have a truck with a bed long enough to haul pipe; we had a Jeep. Upon reflection, Donn called his friend Bob Green, manager of Maxwell Gluck's Elmendorf Farm. Bob said sure, we could borrow a deuce-and-a-half from Elmendorf.

About that time, up drove Teddy Shapou, grinning, cheery as always. Teddy was a fighter pilot in World War II. Late one afternoon, he landed a P-47 some 25 feet short of the runway and jammed a gunsight into his forehead. This more or less amounted to a frontal lobotomy which freed Teddy of social inhibitions he may have had previously. When we would go to Jerry's Drive-in and the girl would bring out a tray of hamburgers and shakes, Teddy would flash that great smile and casually inquire if she were ready to hop into bed with him; as the girl's jaw went slack, Teddy seemed to continue along with the same line, but he really was asking about mustard.

We had known Teddy since 1939, when he was a lifeguard at Johnson's Mill. This was a commercial enterprise Willet Groover had built around the Elkhorn Creek dam across the Newtown Pike from us. It comprised a swimming hole with high and low diving boards, two floats, picnic grounds, horseshoe pits, snack bar, dance floor, and a Nickelodeon. Mr. Groover closed the place every night promptly at 10 o'clock, by simply throwing the master light switch.
I spent seven afternoons a week with Teddy, working leaves and branches out of the net stretched across the creek above the floats, raking the horseshoe pits, and listening to his fascinating stories. I worshiped him before he was a war hero. He inherited his charm, ready smile, and dark complexion from a Lebanese rug dealer; he made his body himself, doing one-handed push ups and 40-yard wind sprints between stories. He played football at Georgetown College. He was small at 5-7, but solid at 185 pounds, with thighs bigger than his waist; he had Sylvester Stallone's chest, arms, neck, teeth, and wavy black hair. He was a running back, what was then known as a scatback. We raced a lot, and he always beat me, narrowly, no matter how far my head start; he did it running backwards, smoking a cigar.

He did not own a car then. He jogged the five miles from Georgetown to Johnson's Mill every morning at 10, and ran back in the dark at 10 that night. Mr. Groover shut down Johnson's Mill on Labor Day, when everybody returned to school. After football practice, Teddy had a job in the Sweet Shop on Main Street in Georgetown, jerking sodas for $20 a week.

One afternoon, he slipped away to Keeneland and happened upon a $900 Daily Double payoff. The next morning he jogged over to the Logan-Haggin-Cooper dealership on North Broadway to inspect, again, the elegant Ford Deluxe convertible in the front display room. Old Mr. Cooper, knowing Teddy was a scholarship kid at the college, asked him what he thought he was doing, opening and closing the door on that model. Teddy kicked a tire: How much? $650. Well, Teddy said nonchalantly, I just suppose I'll take it.

He drove it right off the floor, around the block, and parked it in front of the Sweet Shop, top down. When The Gorgeous Mary Jones finally came in, Teddy fixed her a fountain Coke, gave her the usual paper napkin, wrapped straw, and great smile, then casually inquired if she would be interested in going for a ride. Teddy, have you borrowed somebody's car?

Without a word, Teddy took off his apron and grandly escorted the most beautiful girl in Georgetown out the door. With a sweeping gesture, Teddy asked which one these numbers she would like to take a ride in. Oh... Without waiting for a more definite answer, Teddy stepped forward and opened the passenger door of the convertible. Let's try this one. They became engaged before Teddy had driven halfway down the block.

I do not recall what happened to that car, but after the spring semester, Teddy called Donn and asked if he could catch a ride to Lexington. We drove over to Georgetown in what may have been the last wooden-bodied station wagon, and picked him up at the PiKA fraternity house. Teddy waved to us from a second-story window, grinned, threw down a cardboard suitcase--what we used to call a grip--then bounded down the steps after it, and jumped into the wagon singing, "Off we go, into the wild blue yonder..." We took him to the post office in Lexington where he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

Not long after that, Teddy was flying P-40s in China for Gen. Chenault's Flying Tigers. Between missions, the pilots and ground crews would choose up sides and play touch football. For the Georgetown Tigers, Teddy had done most of the running in the old single-wing offense; for the Flying Tigers he did most of the passing. New replacement pilots always were the, last to be picked when choosing sides. Teddy got stuck with a new last-pick and tried him on the first play from scrimmage; he fired off a short zinger on the flat. Well, the new pilot gathered that in easy enough, cut to his left, then to his right, ran through everybody, and scored with a sudden burst of speed that left startled defenders breathless. Teddy said Hey, you look like you can play this game all right--whatcher name? Tom Harmon. There he was, Michigan's No. 98, the Heisman Trophy winner of 1940, probably better known today as the father of a pretty good UCLA quarterback, Mark Harmon, recently voted the sexiest man in Hollywood, over Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson--those kinds of guys.

Anyway, we were standing there trying to figure who we could spare from setting tobacco to go over to Elmendorf and get the truck when here came Teddy, whom we had not seen since the previous summer. He volunteered. I'll get the truck. I've got nothing to do since I've joined the idle rich--100% disability, gotta silver plate up here, none of that cheap, dish-barn pottery for me. He grinned.

I'm tired of hanging around my in-laws' house, anyway. I told my wife I'd get some cigarettes for the father-in-law. (Mr. Jones is very high up in the judicial branch, Teddy confided, bailiff in Judge Church Ford's federal courtroom over in Lexington, so I figure it's wise I cater to him when we visit here, just the one week: out of the year, what the hell.) Told Mary I'd only be gone about 15 minutes; that's about all it should take to drive over to Elmendorf and get that truck.

And he got the truck. Took him a little longer than 15 minutes, though, because Elmendorf was a big farm, and Teddy drove around for a half-hour before he found Bob Green, then spent another half-hour looking for a truck nobody was using, and another half-hour to drive it to The Hollys because he could not shift into fourth gear and go any faster than 35 mph. Still, he returned with a truck, and a smile. Good ol' Teddy, thanks, pal. S'all right, glad to do it.

Now I need somebody to drive me back to Elmendorf to get my car. Right. But we can't do that just now, Teddy, we have to pick up the pipe. Where? Down in the oil field. Where's the oil field? Albany. New York? Naw, naw, just down the road a piece. But what about my car? Don't worry about it; we'll get it when we return the truck. Am I supposed to stand here in this field all by myself until you get back? Of course not, you can come with us. Just stay right there in the truck, drive it by the house and pick up the boys — Vertrees and Ken Brown are still asleep up there--then follow along behind us in the Jeep.

Teddy hesitated just for a moment. He cocked his head, thinking: Well, I guess I can buy cigarettes in Albany--I never told her where I was going to get a pack. So he roused the boys and headed south through Lexington, to Nicholasville, where both Vertrees and Ken cried halt, pointing out that noon is lunch time. Teddy bought. The quest then was resumed, south through Stanford to Somerset, then west at Burnside, and south again through Monticello to...Where the hell is this Albany? We really don't have to go all the way to Albany, because the lease is just below the post office at Aaron. That's fine, because I'd like to call my wife from that post office. She's probably been worrying about my wristwatch. I told her I'd only be gone 15 minutes, and that was about eight hours ago.

The post office was the only structural evidence of Aaron, Kentucky, other than a huge crude-oil collector tank standing right next to it. The post office occupied a portion of a multi-purpose building whose front screen door advertised Nehi. Next to a Wanted poster was a wall telephone with a crank. The party line was in use, and while waiting for someone to hang up, Teddy chatted amiably with the taciturn post mistress. He told her he had driven that truck 120 miles in third gear to buy a pack of cigarettes, and wondered if she had any in stock? No, just stamps, crackers, bologna, and warm pop. Teddy smiled and shook his head.

Hall began to fidget. It was getting late in the afternoon and sunlight might not reach down to the wells by the time that party line was free. Down to where? Just out back of the post office here, down that draw cut by a wet-weather stream about a mile and a half, into the hollow down there; these hills can shut off sunlight quicker than you might want. We really ought to get going. Teddy nodded, said he would stick with the truck and follow Hall in the Jeep. The Jeep was small and could bounce down the dry streambed without too much difficulty, but the truck was wider and taller; thick tree limbs barred its path. The transmission growled when Teddy shifted into first gear and lurched forward. Small branches snapped, but larger ones dented the truck's fenders and cracked the windshield as Teddy cascaded off six-inch ledges. Jesus! This is worse than trying to land on a field while it's being straffed and bombed! By the time everybody made it to the bottom, darkness enveloped old well No. 9. We could not see to cut the casing into smaller sections for loading on the truck. We had to wait for morning's light. We spent the night in Albany's Smith Hotel, took all four rooms.

Teddy finally got a call through to his wife. What have you been doing all day? Trying to buy a pack of cigarettes for your daddy. Where are you? I dunno, maybe in South America, in the Andes. Teddy, you come right home; you know you're supposed to be the honor guest at a fishfry at Harrington Lake tomorrow at 6 p.m. Oh, I'll be home long before that; we're gonna get up early—the Hollingsworths and the Shapous have pretty much taken over the the whole second floor of the Smith Hotel here—and we figure to load some pieces of pipe onto my truck and be outta here by noon. Just a 15-minute job, so I'm told.

Actually, it took longer than that. The pipe was rusty and hard to cut. The load was heavy. We had to winch it back up the series of stone steps in the streambed 10 yards at a time. Okay, now wrap that cable around the next higher tree—no not that little one, the big one over there. It was very hot. Everyone was filthy with rust, sweat, and cable grease. About 3 p.m. Teddy, in an aside, noted that he probably should be getting back to Georgetown so he could scrub-up for a fishfry. Vertrees and Ken jumped right on that idea, reminding Donn and Hall that they also had to get home, so they could find out if their Tuxedos fit for the Junior Prom that night. Teddy proposed that he take the boys home in the Jeep. Oh, all right.

Teddy was arrested in Stanford for having no tailight; he lost some time trying to find a Justice of the Peace who would accept payment of a fine and let him go. After dropping off the boys, taking a shower in Georgetown and changing into clean party clothes, Teddy drove 42 miles back to Harrington Lake, arriving at 10 p.m. Everybody had eaten and gone home.

The next morning we unloaded the pipe at The Hollys, and while Donn and Hall went to work on a mud-caked water pump, I drove over to Georgetown and picked up Teddy, so we could take the truck back to Elmendorf and exchange it for his car. Teddy's car was not where he had parked it. We drove the truck around the farm, asking men mucking stalls if they remembered seeing a blue Buick...no. We found Bob Green. Blue Buick, left behind the carriage barn? I had that towed away-not knowing whose it was, of course. Where was it towed? I really don't know—you might ask the police. Teddy nodded.

He called his wife instead. Teddy said she not only was the most beautiful woman in the whole world, but also the most understanding. She borrowed her father's car, picked us up at the Elmendorf office, and without a word, drove to the police station in Lexington, paid the $179.50 towing and storage fees, and obtained a release. We drove down Manchester Street to a lot enclosed by a formidable chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. There they were, the smashed, the abandoned, the illegally parked.

With a sweeping gesture, she asked which one of those numbers he would like to take a ride in. Teddy flashed that great smile. I wonder if they've got a 1939 Ford Deluxe convertible.

In memory of all the 15-minute jobs we worked together, and the prospects of more to come when you return.

Father (Kent)

The other really fun part of the story is that we named our first dog Teddy Shapou, in honor of this story. Note the part earlier where Teddy is described as stocky with wavy black hair and cocking his head; our Scottie had the same characteristics. We were having dinner with Eleanor and Caroline and Aunt Leslie and Gene Waterfill when Eleanor mentioned Teddy Shapou. Leslie was surprised to hear the name, because she thought of Teddy as the man that came and helped them paint little house. We had fun sharing stories.

MS Walk 2009

2009-04-04T12:00:00.007-04:00

Just back from the Walk. We have raised a little over $3000 so far. It's great to see such an outpouring from people that care about Mary Anne.

Sparky came with me. He thought it was a race, so we ended up near the front by the time we made it around the park.

A beautiful day at Piedmont park here in Atlanta and the most worthy cause I know. Many thanks to those of you who gave. MS Walk 2009

Gaga

2009-03-07T12:20:00.015-05:00

Every small child has a favorite object. Niece Jordan had a stuffed dog named Homer. Caroline had a blanket named Bubble.

Eleanor had Gaga.

TGP, Gaga, Eleanor, Mary Anne

Uncle Tom

Gaga arrived from Uncle Tom on her first birthday. Gaga was a frog puppet; from July 1987 and for several years afterward, he was rarely off of Eleanor's hand.

One night in the crib, Eleanor was inconsolable, which was not like her. She was standing up and crying and would not go to sleep. After quite a while of this, as part of the inspection parents do in situations like that, we removed Gaga from her hand, or at least attempted to do so. Turns out that the nylon thread inside the back of Gaga's head had gotten wrapped around Eleanor's finger. The finger was a little bit blue, but came back just fine after we unentangled it.

We moved to Charleston when Eleanor was around 2. Eleanor's first plane flight was shortly after that when we flew back to DC to see Colm Wilkinson in Les Miserables. We had bought tickets before we knew we were moving after herself saw an interview on 20/20 which closed with the line: "I knew the play was about finding God, but I didn't know they had cast him as the tenor lead". Colm is indeed glorious when he sings Bring Him Home. Listen to it if you never have.

Anyway, boarding the flight, I was carrying Eleanor and she was, of course, carrying Gaga. The flight attendant greeted us and asked Eleanor what the name of her frog was. She said, very clearly, "Gaga". The attendant looked puzzled and turned to ask me. I replied, "Yes, the frog's name is "Gaga".

Bruce and Eben on YGC winter tour in 1983

We enjoyed the show and had a great trip, despite last minute changes that left friend Bruce babysitting, long before fatherhood had blessed him. I remember him working so hard at keeping Eleanor's face clean between every bite in the high chair. Fast forward several years, and I was at his house watching him feed his own 2 year old twins, Sam and Sophie. He turned to me in all seriousness and said, "I don't know how people with triplets do it". It's all in your perspective.

Gaga was close at hand for many years, despite developing a bad case of gingivitis. The pink felt in his mouth deteriorated until it was pretty much gone. We couldn't find an adequate substitute frog, and Eleanor would not have wanted a different one anyway.

You never know which object is going to become a one year old's fascination. It's part of the fun of watching them grow.

Uncle Kent writes about Grandfather Denzil

2009-03-05T20:24:00.007-05:00

The letter below is from uncle Kent to cousin Tish in 1996. I've been working with OCR (optical character recognition), so expect several of these old missives over the next few months. The 4 page addendum mentioned has Grandfather Denzil's work history and will be posted separately later. The letter is long and perhaps only of interest to my blood relatives, but I am thrilled to have the heritage hereby preserved.

In this and all future "Old Letters" posts, my words are blue, Kent's (or TGP's or whoever the original authors are) will be in black

Kent Hollingsworth

September 11, 1996

Dear Tish:
Here's that letter. I would like to tell you about your Grandfather, my Father, but this is no easy thing, for I never really knew him.

Oh, I knew about him. Mother forever talked about him in his absence, when he was off somewhere on a construction job, about how tall and handsome he was, how neat and well dressed he always was. How very smart he was, and how hard he worked. Mother said he would get to the job early, return home late, dead tired, and fall asleep; then wake up in the middle of the night, get out of bed to check the job again, to see how the night shift was working under lights.

Also, how athletic he was. Mother said he was marvelous at golf, and he did have a picture swing, but he never broke 80. Mother reminded that he was good enough to swim on the varsity team at the University of Illinois. In an era when Johnny Weissmuller's flutter kick won Olympic golds by lowering the 400-meter freestyle record by more than 22 seconds, and by becoming the first swimmer to do 100 meters in less than a minute, with that little flutter—Father had an outboard-motor kick, thumpa-thumpa-thumpa, gutters awash, here he comes, you children better get out of his way!

While Mother conceded Weissmuller's chest was as big as Father's (when the star showed up for an exhibition at the Missouri Athletic Club pool) she noted that Father certainly was better spoken. Weissmuller's movie lines were limited to "Me Tarzan. You Jane." And while Clark Gable did have a mustache and parted his hair in the middle like Father, he had enormous ears, so there really was no comparison...

At home, I was instructed that my Father was a nonpareil. At school, I further learned that he was rich. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, "rich" was pejorative, used by sneering schoolmates to separate me from the crowd, at an age and place where one desperately wanted to blend-in and be an inconspicuous part of the crowd.

Anyway, I grew up knowing my Father only by reputation. I never really knew who he was as a young man, what he did, how he did it. We had photographs, proving he was every bit as handsome as his adoring wife thought he was, but I had no admissible evidence as to what sort of person he was when he began making his own way in the 1920s and 1930s. For all that Mother, and Donn, and Hall told me about Father before I was old enough to look at him and listen to him myself, I understood nothing of the inherited and environmental bases on which he built whatever he was. I had no facts, just hearsay, and conclusions from non-expert witnesses.

I needed some first-hand data. So I went first (hand) to the U.S. Census records and found that in 1870, my great grandfather, Joe Hollingsworth, at age 28, and wife Ellen, age 23, were living on a farm in the Allison Prairie Township near Lawrenceville, Illinois. In 1880, Joe, age 38, and Ellen, age 33, were still living there, together with their four children: Charles H., age 9; Ethelbert C. my grandfather, then age 5; Dollie D. (also known as Daisy), age 3, and Joseph J., age 1; plus two live-in workers, Belle Gannen, age 9, and George Kronkenberger, age 20.

The 1880 census for Bishop Township, near Effingham, Illinois, about 50 miles northwest of Allison Prairie, showed that another of my great grandfathers, August Piel, age 41, and wife Sophia, age 40, both born in Germany, had immigrated in 1862 to Illinois where six of their seven children were born, the youngest being Bertha, my grandmother, then age 3.

Most of the 1890 census records have been lost in a fire. The 1900 census, however, reveals that during the last two decades of the 19th Century, Ethelbert, age 25, had married Bertha Piel, age 23, and they still lived there on the family farm in Allison Prairie with their son, listed as Maurice D., then age 1. (Donn said Mother could not stand the name Maurice, and used his middle name, Denzil; Father promptly switched, signing on as Denzil M. Hollingsworth in high school.)
In checking the census for Illinois and Indiana, in the genealogical library at the University of Vincennes, I happened to peek into the town marriage-license book and discovered that Bert Hollingsworth had married Bertha Piel in Vincennes, Knox County, Indiana, about 10 miles east and across the Wabash River from Allison Prairie, on February 10, 1898.

Five years ago, Donn, Hall, and I drove over to Lawrenceville, Illinois, looking for some record of Father and his family in the Lawrence County Courthouse. We found that on July 27, 1870, great grandfather Joe Hollingsworth paid $2,500 [equivalent to $24,625 in 1994 dollars] for a 160-acre farm about four miles east of Lawrenceville in Allison Prairie Township. This farm was in two 80-acre tracts about a quarter-mile apart, one with no improvements, for it cost only $500, the other tract probably having a house on it, costing $2,000.

This, as Old Home Places go, may not have been majestic, considering what $20,000 today would get you on 80 acres—maybe a second-hand mobile home. Be that as it may, Joe worked that 160 acres for 11 years, until he died at the age of 39 on Nov. 7, 1881; his widow Ellen raised three boys and a girl in that trailer, and lived off that flat prairie farm for another 18 years after her husband died.

At the age of 23, my grandfather Bert built a $500, two-story, frame house on the back portion of the farm, married Bertha, and apparently became involved in a family squabble over who owned what. Bert was named defendant in a lawsuit filed in 1898 by his older brother, younger sister and brother, and his mother, to partition the family farm they had shared for 28 years. Pending final order in this suit, Bert's mother, Ellen Jones Hollingsworth, sold the unimproved 80-acre tract to Charles E. Jones, perhaps a relative, for $500, what Joe had paid for it 29 years earlier.

The court then awarded Ellen her old house and 10 acres, valued at $1,000 as her homestead, and another 10 acres as her dower; the remaining back 40 acres were partitioned equally among the four children, Bert getting the 10 acres on which he had built his house two years earlier.

Last month I drove to Allison Prairie to see this house where Father and his younger sister, our Aunt Dorothy, were born. It was unimposing. It was the only house in sight, surrounded as far as one could see by irrigated soybeans and tall, corn, directly south of the Lawrenceville-Vincennes International Airport. In weathering a century on a windswept plain, the clapboard house had lost some paint, but was livable. A young couple and their children were having lunch under a large shade tree beside the house. The young man said he did not know how old the house was, but he understood his grandparents had lived there when they were young, before World War II, and his Father had been born in the house. He said he and his brother farmed some 500 acres on this side, and the other side of Highway 1100N, which the house faced.

My grandmother Bertha apparently did not care for this house, and its surrounding 10 acres, although she had caused her husband to deed over all his rights in it to her in 1899. Also, she did not care for the lifestyle out there on Allison Prairie. Further, she doubted her handsome young husband (Mother said Bert looked like Hall) had any sense of upward mobility, and suspected he was not going anywhere--certainly not upward, socially or economically, and not even to town, geographically.

One evening, Bert returned and was stunned to find the house empty. No wife, no children, no furniture. He was soon to learn that she had sold the property, cleaned out the bank account, and had gone—to where, he knew not. The 1901 St. Louis City Directory lists Bertha Hollingsworth, forewoman, as renting an apartment at 3505 Itaska Street in south St. Louis. (Randolph says a forewoman was a supervisor of other women in a sweatshop; Bertha was making her own way sewing lace.)

Three weeks ago, Dorcas and I drove to St. Louis, checked land and marriage records in City Hall, city directories in the library. Dorcas took pictures of buildings still standing where Father, Mother, Bert, Bertha, Uncle Jim Addis, Chum and Grandmother resided from 1901-40. The neighborhoods around Tower Grove Park, where Father and Mother grew up, contain multi-family brick dwellings built in the early decades of this century. Mother indicated they were occupied by low-income German and Italian immigrants. Now these neighborhoods are all black, save Flora Place,

six blocks with center parkway, leading west from Grand Avenue to the old entrance to Shaw's Garden on Tower Grove Avenue.

Bert did not catch up with Bertha until 1903, when the St. Louis City Directory lists him, as a laborer, residing at 3435A LaSalle Street, a building now razed, in a business zone. At the same address in 1905, we find James T. Addis, listed as a contractor. In 1906, Bert, then and thereafter listed as a locomotive fireman, moved with Uncle Jim a few blocks over to Park Avenue.

We could not find a record of Bertha's divorce from Bert in the St. Louis Civil Courts Building, but we did obtain a copy of Bertha's and Uncle Jim's marriage license, showing the marriage was performed by a justice of peace in St. Louis on Nov. 11, 1908.

The City Directories did not show where Bertha and her children lived from 1902 through 1908. Father told me that he remembered his mother had placed him and little Dorothy in a St. Louis orphanage when he was four or five years old; it was just for a few months, until his mother could find a job and place to live. After a week or so, Father thought she had abandoned them forever, and he had a hard time comforting his younger sister, who cried a lot. Dorcas recalls Father saying they lived for a while in Clayton, a St. Louis suburb just west of Forest Park (site of the 1903 World's Fair which celebrated the Centennial of the Louisiana Purchase).

After Bertha's marriage to Uncle Jim late in 1908, it may be presumed she moved with her children to Uncle Jim's address at 2900 Park Avenue. This was not your usual New York Park Avenue flat. Urban renewal has razed many of the old tenements in this area, but Dorcas was able to take some pictures of young black residents of 2900 Park Avenue. Father probably lived in an apartment at this address for four years, until he was 14; then Bertha moved Uncle Jim and her children to a house of their own, in a little better neighborhood, three blocks west of Grand Avenue, one block south of Tower Grove Park, at 3924 Juniata Street.

Father lived in this two-story red brick house for the next nine years, while going to high school and college; he listed it as his residence on his marriage license in 1923. Dorcas' photograph of this house, shows it was situated quite close to a neighboring house. Donn said Bert worked his way up between these two houses, climbed through a second-story window, snatched Uncle Jim out of bed, told him if he ever drank whiskey at home, in front of his children, he, Bert, would kill him. Uncle Jim recognized the earnestness in this threat and Donn said he believed Uncle Jim never had another drink at home. Which must have been tough, for he was an Irishman, and whiskey fueled his crew of Irishmen who wrecked buildings as a business.

Father said his father never drank or smoked, "but he sure gave women hell”; then he would laugh, embarrassed, and slap his knee. Father said Bert lost his job with the railroad many times, usually for fighting, or arguing with his superiors. Father said Bert was not tall, only about 5-foot-8, but he was robust, very strong, and athletic. Father remembered Bert's lifting him on his shoulders, and jumping off a street car before it stopped, running as fast as Olympic sprinter Archie Hahn, to keep from falling on his face with his top-heavy load. Bertha heard about the stunt and got a restraining order to keep Bert away from her children, and Uncle Jim.

Father did not seem to inherit much from his father, in the way of physical features, mental acuity, or cultural awareness. He had no chance to learn anything from his father, because he never lived with him, never saw him except for brief, uncomfortable visits which his mother
discouraged.

Father probably inherited his drive from his ambitious mother. Bertha devoted all her energies and street smarts to make her handsome son into someone important, whose success might reflect on her. She abandoned a dusty, Illinois prairie, and her unpromising first husband, for the excitement of a big city, and she latched on to a man who had his own company, and who could provide her and her children with a solid brick home.

To expand her social contacts, Bertha formed a sewing circle, inviting the most attractive ladies in the neighborhood; among these was the beautiful and elegantly mannered young wife of a university-educated physicist— Blanche Parrott and Chum. He was graduated from the University of Michigan, with honors in mathematics; while teaching in Saint Johns and Saginaw in Michigan, he had written several scientific articles that brought him some out-of-state notice. In 1909, he accepted an offer to teach at McKinley High School in St. Louis, and moved with his wife and 11-year-old daughter into a nice duplex at 3867 Utah Place.

My grandmothers, Bertha and Blanche, became friends and during sewing circle sessions, exchanged glowing reports on their children. They arranged for Mother and Father to be introduced to each other. Soon thereafter, Father suffered a broken leg playing baseball in Tower Grove Park, and asked Mother to visit him in the hospital.

According to family tradition (compiled mostly by Mother) neither looked for love elsewhere, ever after. Mother was born in June, eight months before Father, and while they were the same age February through June, every September Mother remained an academic year ahead of Father.

In the fall of 1916, Mother matriculated at the University of Missouri in Columbia. While she was gone, Bertha began looking around for a better prospect for her son. To insure that Mother could not tie him up in Columbia, Bertha insisted that Uncle Jim pay out-of-state tuition for Father and shipped him off to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the fall of 1917. Mother transferred to the University of Illinois for her junior and senior years, and there, the twain having met again, they never were to part--Rudyard Kipling notwithstanding.

I have annexed hereto, a four-page chronology of Father's construction work and financial success, abstracted from Father's 1943 application for a commission in the Navy SeaBees. These are facts, over Father's signature, interspersed with my parenthetical notes intended to amplify stark data; I have converted 1920 and 1930 dollars into 1994 dollars, using the U.S. Labor Department's Consumer Price Index table, to place in current perspective Father's earnings in his business-active years.

Father's initial success in the construction business cannot be attributed to his stepfather's guidance. Jim Addis ran a building-wrecking crew of Irishmen, pick-and-shovel men who moved dirt with horse-drawn drag buckets in the first decades of this century. Father ran grades, laid out the work, and supervised the men for his stepfather while he was in college; but he thought in terms of machines and mechanical advantages, and he spoke the language of a university-trained civil engineer, a language Uncle Jim did not fully comprehend. They did not work together long.

Measured in today's dollars, Father earned $147,610 at the age of 26, during his first year of business as his own boss. His stepfather and father never got within 31 lengths of that kind of money. That he was able to buy a $293,000 house
(left to right Blanche, Dorcas, Denzil, Kent, Donn, Hall, Polly, Chum)
two years later at the age of 28 was an indication of precocious business success, attained sooner and in greater measure than anything realized by his forebears, or his descendants. He earned some $321,000 at the age of 32, and he earned about $5 million at the age of 40, from his own physical efforts, his own thought processes, his initiatives, his inventions. No one handed this monetary success to him in a pay envelope. No board voted him a stock option. He earned it, by himself, without apparent benefit of inherited and environmental influences.

For much of my professional writing career, I have been pointing out the incidence of exceptional performers in the pedigrees of successful race horses; and I have emphasized the importance of environment — good food and care during the early years, expert training, and adherence to a well designed strategic plan — to attain success in any endeavor.

I see little of this in my Father's background. He may have been guided, motivated, by his mother and his wife, but many individuals have been guided and motivated toward success, yet failed to realize it for want of other essential ingredients in the mix. Father did what he did mainly on his own. His success was self-made.

I sorely regret that I never really got to know him, that I was so self-absorbed in making my own way, I did not appreciate my Father during his last 25 years, when I had the opportunity to walk at his side.

So I have set out for you here, some of the things your Grandfather did when he was young, about your age, that you might perceive a vague image in the mist from whence you came.
With love,

Father (Kent)

Snow Day in the ATL

2009-03-01T14:16:00.007-05:00

Clearly, white dogs don't show snow well.
Not usually an issue for us, but we were getting some huge wet flakes for a while today. You can see them on Scout much better than on Sparky. This snow is after over an inch of rain yesterday, so it's pretty slushy around here.

The Bradford Pear tree across the street has some blooms, if you can see them through the snow.

The daffodils were standing up before the heavy snow bent them over.

The forsythia really had us thinking spring a couple of days ago.

The magnolia tree really isn't holding that much snow, but I am including it because it makes me smile every time I see it. It has been there since we bought the house, but we only discovered it this past summer, when I finally got someone to do the yard work for me. We thought he had planted it. Really.

If you show your belly...

2009-03-01T13:30:00.006-05:00

There were several socially accepted things when the girls were teenagers that I never could quite tolerate. I have been known to count with my fingers the number of times that someone said "like" when it wasn't a legitimate part of a simile.

Early in the aughts, most girl pants were cut to sit low at the hips and most shirts were none too long. This led to a midriff problem. Caroline continued to assert that she had an unusually long torso, but I would have none of it. I developed a response as per the title of this post, and if either of my girls showed their belly, I would show mine. This was reasonably effective, especially after a Friday night in Madison, GA. We were on our way to Orangeburg and stopped at the Zaxby's off of I-20. It being Friday night, all the cheerleaders were there, along with the football fans headed to that week's game. Anyway, I saw some belly on Eleanor, so hiked my shirt up nice and high and let the hairy man-belly do its thing. Even Mary Anne bordered on being embarrassed. My pastor, Vic, found the story good enough to include in his Easter sermon that year.

The second best part was that most of my Sunday School class knew the story was about my girls, even though we weren't mentioned by name. The best part was that Eleanor, who had obviously been with us at Zaxby's, was out of the country on Spring Break that Easter, so she missed the sermon. As was our custom, we watched it all together on the TV when she was back. We hadn't told her what was coming, but MA and Caroline and I were all watching her and then boyfriend as that part of the story came along. She curled up in a bashful ball on the couch when it became clear where the story was going and the rest of us laughed until, as Bill Cosby says, we fell out the chair.

The empty nest leaves me with fewer opportunities to have much impact on wardrobe. Those were the days.

Facebook

2009-02-17T20:13:00.007-05:00

I had an epiphany Sunday night. I was corresponding with Marnie, our executive pastor at Peachtree Presbyterian Church via Facebook. The dialog was clearly supportive of My 95, an initiative of the missional church to guide parishioners in how to spend the vast majority of their life.

As a part of MEDITECH, my email at work is OPEN. That means that anyone can read it. As an officer of the company, I don't even have a log of who read it (most employees can see who has read their email). It's a very convenient mechanism for checking an ill colleague's email, to make sure their clients get appropriate responses. But now I recognize that it is also a very interesting way to convey to the entire company whatever it is that I want to convey. If I'm writing another officer, I know that dozens of employees will read it.

Clearly, we at Peachtree are using Facebook this way as well. I want you to read what I write on Chuck Roberts or Vic Pentz's wall. We're trying to influence you. As followers of Jesus should be hoping to influence others who watch them with everything we do.

My cousin Randolph has made a career out of figuring out how young folks are using the current media. I think it's cool that we old folks can use the new media as well.

The Cobbler's Children

2009-02-15T20:28:00.003-05:00

Medical care is not always easy to get, even if you live in a doctor's house. However, the tradition of makeshift medicine began a generation earlier, back at the Holly's. Young Vertrees (TGP) used to like the way the cut ends of the tobacco looked as they were hanging upside down in the barn curing. He jumped up to see them and missed the 4x4 rail on the way down. His chin hit a rail, and his lower teeth came through his lower lip.

After a lot of noise, Denzil (my grandfather) was summoned. He attempted to remove the lip from the teeth with the aid of the best tool he had available, a kitchen fork. When that didn't work, they went to the doctor. As the MD was working, he said something to the effect of it appearing that someone had been tugging at the lower lip with a fork. TGP tried to explain that that was exactly what had happened, but couldn't be understood, as he still had teeth sticking through his lower lip.

One beautiful summer day at Spindletop, I was playing on a variant of a see-saw they have there. I kicked my bare foot forward and it dug down underneath a metal handle bar, slamming the left big toe into the metal. It split asunder immediately. Eventually we got home and TGP examined it. The usual rule for pain among the children was that there had to be blood or bone visible, or it had to hurt for two weeks before it warranted attention. This fit in the blood category, so I didn't have to wait. Surveying the damage, TGP when down to the tool chest in the basement. As he came up with the needle nose pliers, Sophia remembers him saying "Oh, this isn't going to be good for Eben". I remember the painful shots of anesthetic, the the removal of the separated top and bottom half of my big toe nail. It really hurt. It hurt at school when someone stepped on it. It hurt for weeks.

Years later, in Charleston, Dunn returned from a game of Bladderball
with the youth group. He came through the first floor in Charleston where I was holding court with Mary Anne, holding his jaw up with his hands, and said "Pleez have Pha check on me when he gets in". After several hours, Dunn got X-rayed to find that he had broken his jaw. Herself passed out at the hospital the next day looking at the X-rays. After several weeks with a jaw wired shut, Dunn was good as new.

I still discount whatever gets hurt. At least we don't panic easily.

MS Walk 2009

2009-02-14T16:55:00.005-05:00

This one is a little harder to write than others posts, as it is more personal. I want to express a little bit about our experience with MS as I solicit for research funds again.

MA was definitively diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in March of 2002, after a first incident over Christmas of 2001. (as you can derive from the name, it takes more than one episode of inflammation of myelin around the nerves in the brain to constitute Multiple Sclerosis). I sent an email to many of our friends at that time; if anyone has a copy, I'd love to see it again.

The hardest part of MS is the lack of predictability. MA had numbness in her face in December 2001, then double vision and vertigo in March while we were with my family in Mexico. Strong doses of IV steroids tend to eliminate the short term problems like that and she did that a few times early on. Over the years since, she has had very few vision problems and no more bad numbness. The persistent recurring symptoms are extreme fatigue and a slight limp.

I did the MS walk in '05, '06 and '07, raising enough to be in the top 100 fundraisers in Georgia. A testament to how many people love Mary Anne. In 2007, our Faithmates Sunday School class from Peachtree walked with me (I should have a picture, but can't seem to find it) Last year, we were in Charleston watching Eleanor in her last college play during the walk, so we missed it. I'm looking forward to walking again this year.

My roommate Chuck said he admired me for how I took care of Mary Anne. It's really not taking care of, it's doing what you want to do for your favorite person on this earth. I love to cook, so it's convenient that it's easier for us to eat in most of the time. We did end up getting a housekeeper, as a concession to my not wanting to take the time to keep the house clean.

An MS blog Mary Anne read a while back was set at a diner and the speaker, who had MS, gathered spoons from some tables and put them in a pile. He explained his experience by saying something along the lines of:
Imagine that everything we expend energy on costs us some spoons and that we all start our days with the same number of spoons. Getting dressed, walking, shopping, even driving takes away spoons. For regular folks, getting dressed and driving somewhere probably costs one spoon. On a bad MS day, that can cost me a whole pile of spoons. This disease just makes me more careful about how I spend them.

We have worked very hard at making this disease less of a limitation and more of an opportunity to be careful with our spoons. Family and friends come first. We have eliminated from our lives many of the less important things that we used spend time and effort on. We do all our shopping on line. We also really don't sweat the small stuff; perspective is a beautiful thing.

Sitting here with the fire on, MA knitting, two dogs in dog ball in the den, life really couldn't be much better.

If you would like to sponsor me as I walk this spring, the link is here. If for some reason that doesn't work, paste the mess on the next line into the address bar on your browser.
http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR/Walk/GAAWalkEvents?px=2158684&pg=personal&fr_id=11240

As the old Bartleby and James commercial used to say, thank you for your support.

Halloween

2009-02-07T18:22:00.005-05:00

I wear a lot of plaid.

Also, patterns, stripes and colors. In general, I am a very good knittee, which is convenient since herself is such a good knitter. See my most recent sweater, done in entrelac, as shown below.
.

I'm not afraid of a strong pattern either. Back when embarrassing the girls was part of my job, I even went so far as to wear both the top and bottom of a wonderful Old Navy pattern. We had Halloween contests at my office in the old days. If you can't read the sign I'm holding, it says "Embarrassing father of teen age daughters".

Come June 5th, I won't have any teenagers any more. I'll miss it.

TGP Autobiography 1993

2009-01-21T20:31:00.012-05:00

Muv found this somewhere and I read it to the immediate family at the beach last July. I thought it was worth transcribing and sharing. I've been asking TGP to write for the blog and haven't gotten much reaction, so I'm using the writing I have from him. Remember this is almost 15 years old as of today.

Part the First - Where I have been

My parents began their lives at the turn of the century:

my mother born first in 1898 as the only child of the union between a hotel/resort wealthy mama and an imperious country farmer turned mathematician/teacher father (whom she worshiped)
my father one year later as the second/last child of a German beer-maker descendant (grandmother Addis) and a flashy con-artist alcoholic (who left his posterity nothing except the Hollingsworth name, being a poor side trip down from Valentine Hollingsworth's 1640 arrival in Delaware)

Mother grew up in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, where she:

learned the resort/hotel business,
gained a vast respect for books
was spoiled rotten by her doting father

thereby giving her deep recesses of self-confidence and a literary bent.

Father grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and acquired a smattering of German, a strong aversion to alcohol and a fondness for things mechanical.

They met as undergraduates at the University of Illinois and were soulmates for 48 years. What a bedrock upon which to lay my foundations! Mother brought intelligence, joie de vivre, literacy and interpersonal skills; Father was a Tau Beta Pi and had a Masters in Mechanical Engineering... a genius at that which seized his attention for the moment.

Throughout the 20s and 30s, my family grew to four very quickly (boy, boy, girl, boy) and while Father earned and lost several fortunes in the construction business. Mother wrote and published multiple volumes of poetry and some plays; she learned to go from two cars and several servants to scrubbing the brick sidewalk of our large St. Louis home without losing a beat. I put in an appearance 8 years after number four, in 1937, much to everyone's surprise ("Polly, dammit, you can't be. We can't afford this right now"), apparently having been acquired on a one year trip around the US and Canada in 1936, looking for military contracts to build another dam similar to Father's success at Ft. Peck.

Father struck it rich one more time in 1938 (found a flaw in the Texas Oil Company's mineral rights to the Salem oil pool in Illinois: obtained them for the "cauliflower strip", a road 1/2 mile long and 30 feet wide from which he and some other connivers took so much oil that Texaco bought them out) and so moved his brood to Kentucky in 1939. We bought a Bluegrass horse/tobacco farm 10 miles north of Lexington and set about learning the thoroughbred/sheep/cattle/fighting-banty-rooster business (everyone should grow up on a farm: the value of one dollar an hour wages is very apparent to all that have worked from dawn to dusk). My first real memory, other than those home movie induced, is one of the announcement of WW II and the departure of two older brothers: the eldest to Camp Blanding, Florida, to be a drill instructor for the duration and the second eventually to Europe with Patton's Army. The rest of the group stayed to run the farm and the horses. Father had retired by this time; two heart attacks before age 41, a severed arm in the 30's (implausibly sewed back on ... Mother wouldn't let them take it off as they should have and it worked! Never have understood that) and Graves disease about finished him. He claimed he had been put up on blocks by the war, just as his V-12 Lincoln Continental was. Mother was never phased by anything. She wrote and directed a major musical production in 1943 at the University of Kentucky and I tasted the theater, gaining accolades from which I never recovered. She led the family in Christmas plays written so that all had parts that fit our personalities. I was usually the goody-two-shoes.

Schooling for me began in 1943 at an eight-classes-in-four-rooms school that Mother thought would be good. "To walk with Princes nor lose the common touch" was quoted all the time, but sounded too fancy for my taste. It was close and I got to ride my bike the 1 1/2 miles each way. There I learned the 3 R's, a rigid meritocracy in which one had to earn the right to play in recess games and a rural approach to sexual education. We were all sexperts by second grade, seeing it practiced every day outside the school by various and sundry animals. Since Mother was the volunteer drama coach, I played the lead in several dramatic operettas.... even though lacking the requisite vocal talent. By the seventh grade, the total lack of social graces caused some concern, so I was sent to a private school in Lexington and discovered that money and privilege covered a multitude of ineptitudes. Quickly, back to my country place for the eight and final year of rural education and then on to a small semi-private "model" high school in Lexington: still possible before the consolidation of districts in the early 50's.

High school is a pivotal experience for most; mine was a pleasant four years with 28 people in the class, and inordinate number of whom would end up in relatively fancy institutions of higher learning. I began to learn about girls instead of cows, boys instead of horses/tobacco, and discovered I had modest skills in a number of areas but was outstanding in none. The choice of becoming a Renaissance Man or a Dilettante struck me. I played several sports, but could "start" only in swimming; I was in plays, in the band, the glee club and eventually was Valedictorian, the only area in which I actually emerged as a winner. I had a remarkably untrammeled child & young adult-hood. I was a fairly strong-willed, somewhat spoiled youth to whom opportunity had come as a genetic and cultural gift, unfought-for. It was now 1955: all my siblings were married and had appropriately multiplied..... I was known as "Uncle Vert" to at least 15 nephews and nieces. My kind and wise brother-in-law touted me on a trip east to school and I became the first of the clan to venture outside the state. I arrived in New Haven, Connecticut on a train and was greener than the grass on the Commons.
Four years later, I could write, think a little, knew my way around New York City and had been accepted to several medical schools. I carried music (I was in the Glee Club and the Band) and theater with me, but majored in American Studies and have loved history, education and teaching ever since. (Didn't give a fig about managing anything until about three years ago).

I met the love of my life in a Lexington summer production of "Carousel" and we were married in 1960, after one year (the worst) of medical school in Cincinnati.
The draft was still with us, so I joined a Navy scholarship program that paid nothing, but let me pick when I would enter upon active duty. Two children, one MD degree and a hellacious year at Receiving Hospital (Detroit's answer to Bellevue) later, the four of us were in Camp Pendleton, California for the most relaxed time of our lives. My wife is an accomplished musician and we were active in singing and church work out there until April of 1965 when Viet Nam began in earnest. By a miracle of uncertain origin, I was taken off the ship on two occasions and not allowed to go to Chu Lai or Saigon (both of which subsequently had Naval Hospitals with several of our friends in them soon thereafter).

We left Naval service and California in 1966, returning to Georgetown, Kentucky to join my closest friend from high school and an older established physician in the general practice of medicine. This would later become Family Practice as we shifted with the times and learned to treat things beside diseases. This was the growth time in our life cycle: family, work, responsibilities..... they all grew. I began to experiment with teaching at the Medical School a few miles down the road in Lexington.

Having found a true California baby in 1966, we had our last in 1968 and upon the latter's entry into kindergarten 5 years later, my wife returned to teaching music. Drama slipped for a little while as the time constraints of a 72 hour work week for me, and 80 hour work week for Alice (full time classroom teacher, church organist/choir director at two churches and +/- 20 voice or piano students!) made for a hectic 14 years.

We grew in the community, added to our home, made lots of friends and worked like crazy. Some 200 deliveries, medical student precepting and sundry medical procedures later (I was a "skin and its contents doctor") there had to be other things to do. Et voila! .............. the Navy casually sent me a recruiting letter.

Part the Second - Where I am Now

It was January of 1980. I began dreaming of three things: teaching, travel and time off (my three T's). We had a family conference with Alice and the three still at home, (#1 was a freshman at Yale by now, so we all decided his vote didn't count). #2 was a Junior in High School (JIHS) and the thought of moving for her last year (to Charleston, South Carolina, the duty station I had been offered) was anathema: one against. #2 was 14 and quickly figured out that he would be 15 in March, a full three months before he could get to South Carolina and take the driver's test that would let him drive a FULL YEAR before Kentucky would allow it: one for. #4 was finishing the sixth grade and figured she was going to a new school anyhow... and fourth children will do anything to avoid a fuss: one neutral/for. Alice looked at me and said, "Whatever you want is OK with me".. not a resounding for, but I counted it.

We sold the practice to my remaining three partners, sold the house (finally, in 1982!) cried with the folks on the staff at the little hospital and wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper to explain why I was taking no new pregnant patients. (I managed to deliver the last one while my wife oversaw the packout....smooth move). We arrived in hot, humid Charleston on 30 June 1980 and a new career/life began for all of us. The three T's and more!

I began the full time teaching required of a Graduate Medical Education (GME); to take young physicians, just out of medical school and convert them into knowledgeable specialists in Family Medicine in three short years. My wife taught in the SC school system and was selected as Teacher of the Year by 1983. I was learning and, having more field experience than the other faculty, became Assistant Head of the department. I spent some time at sea with the Saudi Navy (got a Navy Commendation Medal for teaching them how to use condoms without letting their Admiral know such were needed; adultery is an offense requiring removal of the offending "member".......my wife calls it my rubber medal to this day). By this time # 3 was a JIHS so the Navy naturally picked 1983 to send me to Pensacola, Florida to become head of that residency program. I joined the Faculty of Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), in Bethesda, Maryland at that time, since they sent medical students to us for training. BY 1986, #4 had been graduated from high school, so we moved to Washington to work in medical school academia on a full time basis. There followed two pleasant years as an Associate Professor of Clinical Family Practice, while Alice taught music to angels of the (North) Chevy Chase Elementary.

I became involved in Health Care Planning while in DC and, as the Surgeon General's Advisor for Family Practice, began to visualize changes needed in the organization/delivery of medical care to DOD beneficiaries. That led to several cross-specialty committees and before I knew it, Rota, Spain and Newport, Rhode Island had been selected as Family Practice Demonstration Project hospitals. The idea was to demonstrate the cost effectiveness/customer satisfaction achievable by introducing into the socialized system of Navy Medicine, the concept of continuity of care from a broadly trained specialist who would provide 85% of all care to a command/ship/finite number of families. The first hospital staffed with resources sufficient to the task was Rota; I went there as Medical Director in 1988 and became the Executive Officer in 1989, as we moved into a new facility.

What a gorgeous opportunity it is to live in another culture. To learn new values and an appreciation of one's own is enriching. My wife and I were visited by 3 of our offspring, various college and work related friends; we toured most of Europe and a little bit of Africa; she led the base chapel in song, the base choir in two huge fests and provided music for three theatre productions; I played parts in four plays and was the "face of the base", since I was always on TV explaining health care. I began pursuing the Masters in Management in earnest while there (via Salve's GIS program), having earlier completed the Naval War College curriculum by seminar. As Operation Desert Shield became Storm, I was suddenly ordered back to Newport as Commanding Officer of the local Naval Hospital; one that is undergoing a dramatic set of paradigm shifts. We are embarking on the Navy's first ever use of a civilian facility for our in-patients, while our doctors will be supplying the care. The out-patient portion of care will be rendered in a new facility by a large group of Family Physicians with lots of available consultants. Lots of challenges, lots of opportunities. Thus far, I have been challenged by no major setbacks/disappointments; I have been rewarded by not yet having reached my own private Peter Principle.

Part the Third - Where I am Going

This actually represents my first serious look at the future, at least as it affects my wife and me. As an ENFP (a Myers-Briggs classification that describes one who does not tolerate repetition or sameness for very long), I doubt that the challenges of my current position will hold sway for long. After the political and organizational complexities are ironed out and the mission becomes one of keeping a straight course, I will tire of it and request a change. The Naval Hospital in Charleston holds allure; nearby grandchildren, a residency training program, a large facility (250 beds) and a community with which we are both familiar and comfortable. After that, I have flatly refused to plan.....if flag rank is a possibility (and there is nothing more uncertain than that!), the thereafter will be taken care of by higher challenges. If not, I shall gladly serve out the requisite time to register my twenty years of active duty in whatever capacity the Navy wishes. There are not bad jobs, just bad attitudes (rather like the theater: "No small parts, only small players"). Therein lies my small secret of success....... I have enjoyed everything I have done and have had no major lasting disappointments. Each step along life's path has had a delightful form of recompense, not the least of which has been a wonderful marriage, a super set of offspring and a rewarding career.

In any event, in July of 1998 (at age 61) I intend to hang up my ancient stethoscope/Cross pen and embark on a set of world travels that will include exotic destinations, grandchildren, reading, music, theater and raconteur-ing. I intend to enjoy the trip through the rest of my life; the destination and the stops along the way no longer hold much in the way of fear or trepidation. I rather look forward to each day's challenges as the stimuli that will keep the blood flowing smoothly.

My epitaph? Simple:

You only live once,
but if you work it right,
once is enough.

As he says, it's great to be well brought up. Understanding the heritage helps us understand the present. Since this was written, he went to San Diego, then retirement from the Navy and several years in Pinehurst, where he and Muv still reside. He is now nine-toed, one-eyed stroke man, living and loving life.

Sparky's first real haircut

2008-12-16T20:36:00.005-05:00

They have both gotten pretty hairy. Sparky reminded us of the Abominable Snowman.

The furry one from a side view:

Then they spent today at the groomer:

Don't they look great?

If you give a mouse a cookie

2008-12-13T18:25:00.004-05:00

TGP grew up in the Hollys, when Grandfather Denzil moved the family to Kentucky in the 30s.

Just to the left of the front entrance is the library, pictured below. Long before my time, it held a beautiful partner desk, where Denzil and Polly worked together.

In 1986, I brought the desk to Charleston. It then spent some time in the upstairs of Orangeburg, but finally made it to the den of our house in Atlanta. See Caroline using it below.

As decorating progressed, the desk ended up in the basement. Teddy had eaten some if it, and time had not been kind.

For our upcoming 25th anniversary, we decided to get the desk restored. Here it is on its way back into the house:

We're working on some wonderful decorating around this piece. Think of the desk as the cookie and Mary Anne as the mouse.

Sparky has his operation

2008-12-02T20:45:00.004-05:00

He's certainly not convinced it was a good idea, but Sparky was neutered today. He's pretty pitiful now, but should be felling better in a couple of days.

The Elkhorn Creek

2008-11-24T22:03:00.023-05:00

It has been way too long since I've written. By way of excuse, we've been traveling a good bit. But I've missed it and hope to do better. There are lots of ideas in the future blog entry hopper.

Looking at where we grew up, this one is hard to believe. I've also hesitated a little about this entry because I'm not sure how to make it funny. In the end, however, getting the story out is more important to me than provoking laughter.

Check out the dam in our back yard; it was about a 10 foot drop down.
There are a lot of dams on the Elkhorn. Chuck Ellis and I canoed from our house to Frankfort as a high school senior project; we had to portage around the places where the creek drops. The dam in our back yard was also why the creek was deep upstream. That let us have the tire swing - see Kim the delightful child story. There will be a story in the future about another bridge over the creek and certainly more about jumping into the creek from the tire swing.
Every two or three years, the creek would flood. It happened a little more often than it froze in winter. That's part of why the dance hall in the flat back yard was elevated. See the snack bar as it still stood in 1980.

When I'm talking flood, I'm talking about water sometimes up as high as the white boards you see on the snack bar across that very wide area.

Just like we got the pool table because Uncle Hall needed it out of his basement for a while, we got a canoe through some special deal with a local man whose name escapes me that did a lot of canoeing. We enjoyed it during regular creek elevations and even took it on the aforementioned senior project.

Let me digress a bit. As I have aged, I have been white water rafting several times. I have pictures of going in 1984 with MA, then with
Eleanor (2003)

and Caroline (2006).

Note that both my girls seemed to enjoy it considerably more than my wife. When herself and I went with our Sunday School class from Peachtree Pres, she was thinking only of the social aspects. She was a wonderful new bride. It came as quite a surprise that there was actual water and even danger involved. On the trip on the bus upstream, after the guide said when you fall out, MA thought she was going to die. Despite our financial situation, she told me that if she survived, I would have to go to Needless Markup and buy her a dress. It's a pretty floral and she wore it holding Eleanor.
Here is Eleanor in that self-same dress some 18 years later.

Back to the main story. The most interesting and inexplicable use of the canoe was one heavily flooded afternoon in the spring of 1978 (my junior year in high school). TGP decided that we should run the dam when the water was so high that there was no dam. I'm very sorry (for me as much as for you) that I don't have a picture of a flood, but picture the water pretty much flat where you would expect the 10 foot drop. Actually, it wasn't flat, but had a 3 foot drop followed by a 3 foot rise. The general water level was flat from above the dam to below the dam. We put in a few hundred yard upstream, near my cousin Bryan's cabin. I was up front, wearing the life jacket and paddling like hell (think back to the whitewater pictures above). When we hit the dam, the canoe when down the 3 feet, and the angle of the canoe never recovered. When we came up, we were almost at the bridge from which this picture was taken, to give you a sense of the distance.
Somehow, we pulled the canoe over to the side and got out. We walked all the way back over the bridge and back up to the house, coughing, sputtering and laughing the whole way up. I can't imagine how Muv felt watching that adventure.

The canoe made it to Charleston when we moved, but wasn't used in the harbor where the Ashley and the Cooper meet to form the Atlantic. I think TGP ended up giving it away to someone else in the Navy.

I guess this goes in the "Gee, it's great that we survived our childhood" category. In fact, it is a great story because it makes me smile. I wouldn't do that with my girls, but it is fun to remember.

Herman the Wonder Chicken

2008-10-22T20:52:00.011-04:00

I'm not sure what inspired me to want to take Herman (a cement chicken) with me to New Haven for Freshman year at Yale. I actually wasn't brave enough to do it first thing in the fall, but I decided clearly enough that I wanted him that brother Dunn had to carry him through Laguardia Airport in the fall of 83. Good thing that was before the security they have in airports today, because I am sure Herman would not have made it through the carry ons.

This was the trip where upon arrival at the Old Campus, my whole family was looking for me (don't know why TGP didn't know where Phelps Hall was). They ran into Tom Fahsbender (I would love to contact him any yalies that know where he is let me know), fellow freshman, who happened to be in Calhoun College and knew me. Therefore, when TGP said "Do you know Eben Hollingsworth?", Tom was able to answer "You can't be his family, you all have shoes on". (As per the newspaper picture from 1979, I frequently did not wear shoes, even in that northern clime).

What does one do at Yale with a watch chicken, you may ask. We used him as a door stop and decoration, and the roomies were surprising tolerant (probably just thinking this was a southern thing) for all four years. I still don't know what Lo-Babe was doing with the towel in the picture.

Kim told me later on that he and sister Sophia actually lifted that cement chicken from a friend's lawn in Georgetown one night. I didn't know how it first appeared at Millstream but never thought to ask for years.

The saddest part of the Herman story is that I did not send him home after graduation. Herself claims now that she wanted to keep Herman and I refused to bring him home. I don't remember it that way, but then again, it's been over 25 years. I guess I didn't really see a concrete chicken as part of our married decorating scheme, so Herman stayed in the squash court storage in the basement of Calhoun College in May 1983. Hopefully, some underclassman put him to work the next fall. MA thinks someone probably threw him off of the balcony pictured here in the fall of 1983.

Surprisingly, years later, she wanted some homage to Herman. The chicken we bought in Pinehurst seems a pale comparison.

Gasoline

2008-10-19T16:41:00.004-04:00

We had a small scale gasoline crisis in the ATL a couple of weeks back. After supper one night two weeks ago, we loaded up the dogs and the four of us spent 30 minutes in line at the local Shell station so we could get filled up. If you looked at the national gas price map, you would have seen that Atlanta was the darkest kind of red. The price has dropped a dollar a gallon since then, but everyone is still of a mind to make sure every drop counts.

I was listening to Click and Clack on NPR in August, and they got a call from a woman who lifted up the gas hose to empty the last few drops into her tank after she shut off the fuel pump. As you would expect, Tom and Ray mocked her severely. She was even forced to admit that her 16 year old son refused to follow her lead and raise the hose. Upon further inquiry, the Magliozzi brothers found out that her father had taught her the trick about lifting the gas hose.

I learned a lot about driving from TGP. He did a lot of random honking of the horn to keep rabbits out of the road. When queried as to the efficacy of that, the answer was always "You don't see any rabbits, do you?". There was also his axiom that once cruise control was set, it should never be broken. Muv's sucking in air through her teeth was not enough to provoke a slow down, whether for an off-ramp that really shouldn't be taken at 55 or a driver ahead of us that didn't understand his car needed to move back to the right lane.

The most lasting lesson Pha taught was that you should shake your car after the gas pump turns itself off so that the gas settles in the tank, making more room so you can top off the tank. You have to grab the car high on the back side and push and pull to rock it back and forth. It was probably an interesting sensation for those still in the vehicle. I persisted for years even over the protests of herself and wonderment of both girls. It was only when Helen and Jenny went on a long trip with MA and she told them stories about me that the teasing became too much to overcome and I had to stop. Not that I ever really got that much more gas in the car after shaking it, but it was a habit. Even so, I was able to stop cold turkey, and don't even do it on the sly when I am alone filling the car.

I really didn't get back at Helen until I showed her Scout's AKC registration. Our Welsh Terrier's official name is Helen Scout Poole.

In the end, watch your habits, because you never know which ones your children are going to pick up. At least teach them some good ones.

Managing Maxine

2008-10-19T11:22:00.008-04:00

Herself and I went to the Alliance Theatre yesterday afternoon to see Managing Maxine. This production is the world premiere of a work written by Atlanta's own Janece Shaffer. We enjoyed dinner with Janece and her husband in August, and it was a great pleasure to see the finished work after hearing about its origin and evolution. I do not agree with the AJC's tepid review, and would encourage anyone in town to see this show.

The show is full of well painted personalities. It is multi-generational, but the truths about relationships cross all age barriers. I believe that Janece wanted us to leave the theatre more in love with our spouse and believing more in the possibilities of love, and she accomplished that. MA & I agreed that the whole show was really about acceptance. Once a couple truly accepts each other, they can have real intimacy.

The set was open, portraying the living spaces of three of the characters and the lighting was used to move from scene to scene. It worked well as we followed conversations between daughter and mother while seeing both.

The cell phone usage and conversational speech gave a very genuine feel to the entire production. We heard the actors in AfterTalk after the show and they talked about how their own experiences contributed to their performances. We felt that during the show.

We laughed and we cried; what more can you ask for from a couple of hours in the dark?

Sparky's ears, the sequel

2008-10-02T21:07:00.012-04:00

Scottish Terrier puppy ears are fascinating to me, even if not to anyone else. After working at it so hard, Sparky got both ears up, as noted on the post from 9/20. Shortly after that post, as if to question my journalistic integrity, the right ear remained up, but the left one went down. Watch the ears from several angles:

This week, his ears are back up, presumably for good.

Lest we forget Helen Scout, the two of them continue to get along very well:

And finally, just because I am enjoying the pictures, remember the debate in the late 19th century about whether all four legs of a race horse were in the air at the same time. They used photographs to settle the question (they are). Scout's legs are also all in the air at the same time:

I Love Technology

2008-10-02T20:46:00.010-04:00

The first half of this was written on 9/25, as I waited for Delta for 3 extra hours to get home after a conference in Canton, MA. The title, of course, comes from Kip's song (after the credits) in Napoleon Dynamite.

I'm stuck in Logan Airport with an hour to kill before my flight. Logan advertises their WiFi all over the airport, but I'm too cheap to pay the $10 per day for an hour's benefit to get access to the net. Unfortunately, all my story ideas are on my Google Docs. It's so rare these days to not have access to the net that leaving my story ideas there seemed perfect – I could get to them from whatever computer I was using.

The Legal Seafood test kitchen at Logan has, as always, a great clam chowder. The lobster roll isn't bad either.

What does ubiquitous connection to the net really mean? Google is betting that it means having all your data in the cloud is the technology of the future. As I use more and more different computers (2 desktops and 2 laptops at home, plus a work laptop), it's easier to imagine not caring which machine I'm on. My daughters' generation assumes it; they have never used an email client that stored the messages on their local hard drive.

Having all my data on the cloud reminds me of when daughter Eleanor first became vaguely aware of the telephone. She assumed that our home number in Mt. Pleasant would follow us when we went to a friend's house. Before she reached adulthood, that was her reality. The dorm freshman year included a land line; I don't think she ever gave out that number. She certainly never checked the old-fashioned answering machine I attached to it. The cell phone in my pocket is now the best way to reach me also.

As I review my airport ramblings towards the end of the next week, it's clear that the theme I was trying to get to while stuck at Logan is the evolution of technology to meet at least some of our expectations. Eleanor expects her phone number to follow her and eventually that's exactly the way it works. I have always thought we should have a cashless society. Clearly, I was ahead of my time.

In 1984, six months after our nuptials, I was on my first business trip. NDC was selling its pharmacy system to Rite-Aid and somehow I was sent to a 2 day meeting in nowhere Pennsylvania. It took one day more than expected to close the deal, so I extended my trip. That meant that I used the last of my cash in Washington National airport as I changed planes on the way home. I spent $10 in 1984 dollars for an unappetizing hot dog. I arrived at Hartsfield about 10pm. I recognized my dilemma immediately in that my VW Rabbit was in the parking lot and I didn't have the cash to get it out. There were no ATMs at the Airport. The ticket counters were closed, so no one could cash a check for me. The worst part is that I spent an hour looking around to try to find some way to fix my problem by myself. By the time I called my bride about 11pm, our friend Kim had just left the house after giving up on waiting for my return. MA had to go to the ATM on Jimmy Carter Blvd (a sketchy place even then), and then drive 20+ miles to the airport. That's an awful lot to ask from a 22 year old girl raised in small town SC, especially very late at night. When I saw the maroon Renault Alliance approach the drop-off point on the airport road, I was thrilled. Herself, clearly less so. She stopped and I opened the door. She threw a 20 dollar bill on the passenger seat. I grabbed it and she sped off quickly enough that the door closed on its own. It was a long drive up I-85 to the Treehouse apartments.

Today, the parking ticket machines inside the terminal don't even take cash to pre-pay before leaving ATL; they only take credit cards.

I love technology.

The Delightful Child

2008-09-22T22:04:00.006-04:00

Lemon's Mill is not a road like many of you have driven with much regularity, but its character is central to this story. It is about a lane and a half wide and has some wicked curves. The curve and hill we remember most is the one where TGP has a wreck in his Omni (TGP was never really very good at picking cars). It really was a bad Sunday afternoon for USAA, because Muv ran headfirst into a station wagon driven by a pregnant lady on the way home from church. As we were waiting for police, etc., one of the bystanders was warning approaching traffic a little ways back from the first accident. TGP came along, saw the man waving his arms and decided it was better to run the Omni up the embankment rather than over the man directing traffic. It went up and then flipped over on its roof. Muv was close enough to see his flipped car and burst out in tears, thinking Pha was hurt. Instead, inside the upside down Omni, Pha was simply gathering his pocket contents off of the roof of the car before unbuckling, dropping, then crawling out. Anyway, Lemons Mill was how we always got from Georgetown to Sleepy Hollow.

I met Kimberly at swim practice, which was at the tiny indoor pool at Georgetown College. He had just moved from Olympia, Washington and we hit it off immediately.

His first visit to Sleepy Hollow, of course, took him out Lemons Mill Rd and he loves to tell the story of that trip. Not surprisingly, my brother Dunn was doing something challenging in the middle of the back seat as we were heading home. Muv was, as usual, going 70 down Lemons Mill. Dunn's action required some response from Muv, so she took off her shoe (at least in the story, it is pointy toed and high heeled) and beat him where he sat, without turning around or slowing down. Kim took great note and decided that Muv was someone to be respected.

Life went on and unlike the picture above, Kim became much bigger than me. Perhaps to avoid the "Boy named Sue" syndrome, he became affectionately known as Red; we became BFFs. Fast forward to my junior year in high school, and one of many random gatherings around the creek. Kim, me, Soph, Karen S. and probably several others of us were at the dock. Muv's rule was that no one could swim in the creek unless she was there. An interesting rule given that she couldn't swim a stroke. On the creek, the lure of the green water was too much for almost all of us and we used the tire swing to jump in. Kim, however, resisted the temptation and sat on the dock. As usually happens when kids are doing what they shouldn't, Muv came home as we were swimming. There is no way, especially without towels, to appear dry right after being in the Elkhorn. Muv surveyed us all in our wetness and contrasted it to Red's superbly dry self. She fussed at us all pretty strongly, but declared him a "delightful child".
Some thirty years later, he still is.

The drought in Georgia

2008-09-21T16:37:00.004-04:00

We had the big pine tree in the front of the house die fairly suddenly a few weeks ago. Apparently, that's what happens after extreme drought. Even with slightly better rain this year, the dry times in the past were too much for that big old tree.

It took about 3 1/2 hours for the crew to take care of it, but I've condensed it into about a minute. Note the use of the "zip line". Because there are Crepe Myrtles right underneath the tree, they let the high cut branches slide down a rope into the yard instead of falling straight down.

Enjoy the video.

Sparky's ears are up

2008-09-20T17:29:00.001-04:00

Doesn't he look great?

Scottish Terrier Ears

2008-09-07T20:28:00.008-04:00

As our Sunday School teacher today said, you have to look for moments to celebrate "In the Meantime". She meant that real life frequently happens on the side while whatever else you are doing that you think is important is happening. Many of our moments lately have been puppy inspired. It's great to watch Sparky's ears evolve on their own from floppy and almost labrador-like to the standard firm up-pointing Scotty ears.

Remember Sparky at 8 weeks. Note the floppy ears:

By his second weekend here, he was more adventurous, but the ears haven't done too much:

Now at 10 weeks, Sparky's left ear is up. The right one is at three quarters. It's a very good look on him:

I'll post again when the ears are all the way up.

Just for fun, we have below Sparky's first hole, Scout and the soccer ball and both pups relaxing.

And finally, because Steve asked, here's 10 seconds of Scout playing soccer in the back yard:

Water balloons at UK

2008-09-04T19:42:00.003-04:00

My hard-earned tuition dollars at work

Video

Oh, yes, Caroline was there. Bill was too.

Bow and Arrow

2008-09-02T21:38:00.010-04:00

First, let me introduce Tom Grunwald, fourth form head and most interesting member of the Sayre School faculty, hereafter affectionately referred to as Gruner. I have also referred to TGP in an earlier post, and will frequently in the future. TGP is "The Great Pha". Pha is Father and the somewhat self-chosen moniker came about somewhere late in high school, during the trip he chaperoned to Williamsburg.

Anyway, on with the story. As part of American History in ninth grade, Gruner wanted us to understand what it took to create a bow and arrow. Actually, he was willing to provide the arrow; we just had to create the bow.

Living in the country, you would think that it wouldn't be too hard to find a suitable piece of pliable wood. Wikipedia says: "Find a piece of dry, dead but not gray and cracking hardwood--oak, hickory, yew, black locust, or teak" Honestly, I don't even remember the search across our acreage for the bow wood. We had birch and a few other types of trees, but Uncle Hall mowed just often enough that there wasn't a lot of dead wood anywhere on the property. I eventually found some piece of wood that I thought would be suitable and brought it home. I worked and worked at bending that wood so I could string the bow. It didn't bend much.

I do clearly remember that after my stringing effort failed, TGP came to the rescue. He promptly pulled and pulled and finally broke the bow that I had found. It was late and it was dark, so we shifted to the next obvious choice, a broom handle. Recall the Wiki article and the fact that there was no mention of broom handles. Think logically about what you want a broom to do (not bend) and contemplate what comes next. TGP said "Oh, it will be fine" with enough authority to inspire whittling. Amazingly enough, whittling was followed by an exceptionally long time in the bathroom with the shower on hot for steam. A 40 gallon hot water heater will only produce steam for so long (check with 19 y.o. Caroline for exactly how long), but that process was repeated for multiple cycles. Thankfully the Tankless Water Heater had not yet been invented. I'm surprised that my bathroom wallpaper even survived the night.

Very late that night I had, essentially, a tapered broomstick with a bow string that literally touched the bow for the length of it. Not any bend at all.

Now, being a straight A student, I was nervous going into class with my sorry bow. Gruner took one look at the contrivance and said, "Oh, it will be fine". Perhaps an interesting trait of Kentucky men, or just an interesting coincidence between Pha and my history teacher. We went from Old Sayre to the parking lot behind the gym. Several bows were demonstrated with real arrows and pullable strings. Gruner took what I brought from home and worked at stringing it. He just wanted to force a little bend in it.

Of course, Gruner broke the broom handle bow trying to string it there in the parking lot. I don't know what grade I got on that project, but it was not a high point of my academic career. It's not clear what we learned about native Americans, except that I bet they were better at making a bow than this ninth grader at Sayre. But I do laugh when I remember the story. And I love having grown up trying to make things out of orange juice cans and bailing wire.

Modern Communications

2008-09-02T20:03:00.010-04:00

Well, response to the blog has been somewhat mixed. Most of my friends and family apparently don't do blogs on a regular basis. Someone guided me to Facebook instead, to see her profile, but I don't do social networks much. I am now on Facebook, with two friend invitations out. I've seen at least a few people that I have lost touch with that I will work towards reconnecting with via Facebook, which makes that effort worthwhile.

Anyway, even in the empty nest, with supper to make, puppies to walk and just a little relaxation time, it's hard to imagine how folks spend too much time on social networks or blogging.

That said, email has been a great boon to communication. I email my father-in-law almost every day and we both are better for that correspondence. And, to continue my edits on this post, I had to bring a laptop up to the bedroom, so electronics are good for something.

I talk with herself a lot about maintaining contact with people. It takes time and effort, and perhaps these mechanisms can be a way to leverage some of that time. College friendships seem easier by comparison because you're in close proximity with the people you want to see. Many of our friends and most of our family are tens of minutes if not hours away.

Herself wrote some hand written notes this evening. Now there's a communication method that we reserve only for expressions of gratitude.

Even after stewing for several days, this post is rambling. Then again, that may be what blogs look like.

Sparky Video

2008-09-01T15:22:00.001-04:00

At least some of you have asked, so here is some video of Sparky:

A new addition

2008-09-01T14:47:00.001-04:00

This is my first blog post. I still have some qualms about the public nature of blogging, but she who will be obeyed is rightly pressuring me to write some.

The Blog title, "What A Bunch" is what TGP said every night as we scattered to go to bed. I hope for these musings to be mostly about family, so the title seems appropriate.

This post should be about the new addition to our family. Reds fans from the 70s will remember Captain Hook, who pulled pitchers early in the game before that was cool. The Big Red Machine was always more about the bats than the arms. We have been a dog family since shortly after our move to a house with a real back yard in 1997. Teddy Shipou (whose story will certainly be in a later post) was a great dog, but he died rather suddenly earlier this summer. Both girls were home, which was a blessing. We mourned, but were ready to go back to being a two dog family again fairly soon. The girls insisted that we not get another Scottie that looked just like Teddy, therefore the more obscure white-haired variety became our focus.

Meet our version of Sparky Anderson:

Some challenges remain with formatting.

We'll see how this evolves. I anticipate musings on topics of interest, which will include family stories, grammar, software development, child rearing, my faith and who knows what else.

Stay tuned.