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Here’s To What Was

Hunker Down with Kes

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Adolph Hitler was once named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. Joseph Stalin made the list twice. Ed Wiley was, to my knowledge, never considered for the honor. That’s how skewed looking back can be at times. Yet, we can’t seem to help ourselves as one year draws to a close and another gets set to crank up.
Everybody joins in the act. Hollywood reviewers select their ten best movies of the year. CNN and Fox select their top news stories. Every local paper has their list. The Golf Channel fills up the last week of December regaling us with their choices for the year’s best shots.
The operative word here seems to be “their.”
Sport Magazine’s December issue fell right in line as they would feature the best teams and the top plays from the waning year. It heralded Willie Mays’ catch on Vic Wertz’s deep fly to dead centerfield at the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series as “the greatest catch” of the year, if indeed, not all time!
Listen, I love Willie Mays. I talked Leon into driving me all the way to St. Louis in 1962 just to see him play. I wouldn’t dare take one jot away from his Hall of Fame career.
But I saw John Ingram make a diving catch in the old field across from the Pajama Factory off a line drive hit by Don Simmons that would make that ’54 World Series catch look like a routine pop fly on the infield!
The best thing about looking back… it’s very much in the eye of the beholder!
And this rearview picture is definitely tinted by age. When we were pre-teens watching another year slip away playing “hide and go seek” behind George Sexton’s house we didn’t do much reflecting.
Our thinking process was pretty straight forward. We didn’t ponder cause and effect; or long term implications; and heaven forbid if we related a past event as a learning or growing opportunity.
We just “remembered” the old radiator blowing a gasket and sending steam spewing across the fourth grade classroom. It might have been the highlight of the year. ’Course, Yogi bouncing off those tree limbs when our faux ski lift broke was some more sight to see!

And Buddy maintained for years that David Mark plunging through the iced over pond and dropping completely out of sight was a top five contender.
I don’t remember us rating them; or picking a favorite; or really clinging to one more than another in those formative years. We were simply looking back to validate that we did SOMETHING that showed we were alive during the year!
Riding Uncle Clifford’s cows was a no brainer highlight. We didn’t have a saddle. Nor did we have a bridle that would come close to fitting over those short horns and wide face. Most of those Herefords didn’t want to be ridden! We’d shoo one over close to the loading chute and jump on. The Wild West didn’t exactly come alive. But believe me, we tasted the dust and the cockleburs and the blood…
Somehow, in the year end retelling, Leon always rode a little better than I remembered. And he won EVERY backyard football game. He even claimed one year he kissed Barbara Burke back in July behind the swimming pool.
Big brothers, I came to realize, had the authority to look back anyway they wanted to. It was kinda the same as Time Magazine picking Adolph Hitler over Mr. Ed Wiley.
Life gets complicated when you get past sixteen. As does the year in review… Success and failure come into play. The rainy night you scored your first high school touchdown… there’s a “remembrance” that will linger way past December.
Of course, the very next night, you stand on a moon lit front porch in the unimaginable embarrassing “silence of eternity” as Billie Jean Barham answered with a semi-polite “no” to your sincerest request to take her to the prom — it’s a memory that won’t let go no matter how earnestly one tries to erase it!
As you grow older you realize every year counts. And sometimes the memories now… are better than when you made them.
And the best ones are very personal. Mr. Ed Wiley was our city clerk. He was quiet, unpretentious, honest to a fault, taught my Sunday School Class for years and reminded me of Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” He was simply the best person I knew growing up.
And that’s a memory Time Magazine, in all its glory, could never capture.