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Hunker Down with Kes

Leon Didn’t Get Home With Any Candy

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People ask me from time to time why I don’t add pictures to my stories. I think there is a twofold answer here. First of all, we didn’t have any money. Those Kodak Brownie cameras were expensive. And it you wanted a Polaroid Land model J66 with the Electric Eye it would cost you even more. We didn’t have anything to take a picture with!
 
I think at one time in McKenzie, Glen Chalk had the only camera in town.
 
And the second answer is we just didn’t think about it. Heck, we were kids. Living in the moment! I remember Buddy Wiggleton borrowing George Sexton’s bicycle and trying to jump that ditch behind George’s house using a homemade ramp featuring mostly some old barrel staves we’d salvaged from somewhere. It might not have been the smartest idea we ever came up with... 
 
A picture to capture, validate and memorialize the moment “forever” never crossed our minds. I was thinking more like, somebody is about to get killed here! I mean, it became apparent pretty quickly that this wasn’t going to work. Buddy was pedaling down the hill a “hundred miles an hour” as he approached the tiny ramp. We all swore later that the ditch got wider as he got closer!
 
In retrospect I guess we were a bit shortsighted. I can still see Bud in midair with that bike falling from underneath him. You talk about a Kodak moment!  
 
Of course, we didn’t have time after the crash for any pictures. We were too busy trying to get the bleeding stopped.
 
I would have loved to have had a picture of Bobby Brewer standing beside the mailbox we’d accidentally dropped a cherry bomb in. It blew the sides completely out of that thing! I’m telling you, it was a smoking, twisted mess. ’Course, we were two houses down the street, and hiding six rows deep in a cotton field when the owners came out to inspect the carnage.
 
I don’t think we wanted a group picture there!
 
A snapshot of Leon as the headless horsemen would have been a treasure for sure. That missed picture was the Halloween Leon buttoned his shirt up over his head, climbed aboard Prince determined to “trick or treat” his way to every house in town.
 
Prince was a big horse. And he liked to run. It was near ’bout plumb dark. And Leon couldn’t see a lick through that thick cotton shirt.
 
There was not a camera flash invented in 1958 that could have given enough light for a good picture. And it would have had to been taken fast...that horse was at sprint speed in a nanosecond! And all you would have gotten was the backside of Prince and a headless “form” holding on for dear life.
 
Leon wound up that night 12 miles down the road in Trezevant. If they took any pictures of his late October visit, I have never seen them.
 
Mr. Chalk had a Studio uptown. He took most all of our yearbook pictures. He would do family portraits, weddings, anniversaries, reunions or anything else you’d ask him to do. Smart thinking kids would have had him down at the big ditch when Buddy left the ramp...
 
Mom finally bought a Polaroid Instant Camera at a yard sale over on Walnut Avenue. You took the snapshot and waited 60 seconds while your picture “faded” in. It was pretty amazing, although the image never seemed to “fade in” all the way. Dad liked it because he said the graininess hid his age lines. I didn’t like it because it made my fifteen year old face look like it HAD age lines!
 
I did date a couple of girls that make me completely thankful that we didn’t have a camera surgically implanted to our hands like the kids do now. 
 
But I do regret missing so many endless photo moments by not paying more attention back in the day. Oh gosh, there was the big fight at the Skyway Grill, my first American Legion home run, Rollin Trull on that big Harley, the cab stand up at the City Café, the girls’ hairdos coming out of Imagene’s Beauty Shop on a homecoming afternoon, Jimmy Joe Fitzgerald doing a back flip off the high dive at the swimming pool, Butch Dickson kicking the concrete walk in front of Ed Newbill’s Pool Hall with his half-moon taps and making sparks fly, countless hound dogs laying on the back steps, the night the Harlem Globetrotters came to our gym...
 
It is true we don’t have the photos in a scrapbook somewhere that I can pull out and add to a story. But I’ve got the pictures in my memory bank. They definitely haven’t faded and they are not grainy... And, as you might well imagine, they get more precious with each passing year.
 
Respectfully,
 
Kes
 
PS: You know, I got to thinking; if we had the pictures, there would be no need to tell the story.