When I was child, I enjoyed childish things.  Like Scooby Doo and The Monkeys.  I loved Scooby, it introduced me to the concept of mysteries and crime fiction, something I love to this day.  I liked Velma’s irrepressible nature and her insistence on the rational.  There are no ghosts.  There must be something behind all this.  A man in a mask.  And through hard work and improbable traps, you can get to the bottom of it.  Oh, and we would have got away with it, too if it weren’t for you meddling kids.  Meddling kids and their triumph over conniving adults.

But when I became a woman, I put away childish things.  Until my own child became big enough to demand television.  And it was to my great delight that Scooby Doo is played endlessly on certain satellite channels and my even greater delight that my son loves to watch Scooby, too.  The original Scooby shows are still fantastic and one of the few cartoons that I can sit through without becoming annoyed.  Sometimes I watch them.  And sometimes I just let them flow over me, as comforting as a cradle song, while I do something else. There’s something wonderfully nostalgic about watching episodes about a man in a mask with an impossibly contrived scheme to bootleg records. Yes, actual LPs which were copied laboriously in a secret, creepy cave studio and then smuggled across a river by a henchman in  ghost pterodactyl hang glider contraption.   Oh, the days before peer to peer file sharing. If  you wanted a copy of Dixie Chicken live, you’d have to make a shady deal with a man who talked pterodactyl – Veek! Veek!

But these kids channels don’t just show the original Scooby and the series that followed in the original format. They show new modern Scooby, where Fred no longer sports a cravat.  They show a bizarre and poorly drawn spin-off which features only Shaggy and Scooby living in the home of their rich uncle with a robot butler that’s forever getting them out of scrapes.  And they show Scooby movies with complicated plots and commissioned soundtracks. 

Yes, they show those originals and they also show – on occasion – the ones with Scrappy Doo.

It sends a shiver down my spine.

Yesterday, there was a Scooby marathon and after they’d run out of the original and the next series and the movies, they showed some Scrappy Doo episodes as well.  Like every Gen-Xer, I hate Scrappy.  Scrappy is evil.  Scrappy is symbol of all things rotten.  And so Scrappy cannot be shown.  My son did not understand, but the channel was changed.

But watching Scrappy again as an adult as I did on one occasion not too long ago, I realise it’s not Scrappy’s fault.  Scrappy’s introduction to the show coincided with a complete change in format.  Instead of mysteries, it was random running around with ‘real’ supernatural elements.  No more looking for clues.  No more solving puzzles using ‘logic’.  No more nuance of personality from Fred and Velma and Daphne.  It might as well have been a different show.  And we Gen-Xers, only being young’uns at the time, didn’t see that they were dumbing the show down in a misplaced effort to salvage the ratings – instead we blamed Scrappy – who from an adult perspective isn’t as annoying as I remember.  It’s the whole show that’s annoying.  It’s a betrayal of Scooby and a betrayal of us as the audience.  There was no mystery to engage with, we were only being served up dross in the form of Scooby snacks to consume passively.   It was perhaps the first time we were aware of the entertainment industry treating us like morons – and we could never forgive the messenger. The live action Scooby movie even played on this – casting Scrappy as the ultimate villain (sorry for the spoiler, but honestly the film is pretty wretched).

The boy is only 3, so he screamed and wailed when I insisted that no further Scrappy shows can be watched in my house.  So long as I pay for the roof which shelters the tv that I bought receiving the satellite signal that I subscribe to there will be no Scrappy.

(Photo credit: fallentomato )

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British readers probably wouldn’t know he was a senator from Tennessee or remember that he had an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2008.  His campaign for the Republican nomination was hotly anticipated, but his declaration in Lawrenceburg’s public square in 2007 was the high point of the campaign.  It all kinda went down hill from there.   Some people might remember him from his role on Law and Order where he played the gruff Southern DA.  But it’s fair to say that he’s doesn’t figure big in British cultural consciousness.

Fred on the Square in Lawrenceburg

But he’s a big deal in Lawrenceburg, we haven’t had a politician from the Burg that famous since Davy Crockett packed in his congressional career by unwisely feuding with Andrew Jackson and went off to Texas.  (His statue still adorns the Square).   And, of course, he’s a big deal elsewhere, too.  He was part of Watergate, he’s a successful character actor, he’s played a big role in Tennessee politics particularly in the shift from being traditionally Democratic to what’s now called a Red State.

But the book isn’t about any of those things, really.  It’s about growing up in Lawrenceburg.  A small town in the rural South.  The buckle of the Bible Belt.  Reviews on Amazon say that he’s captured the story of growing up in the small town rural south.  And I’m sure Lawrenceburg is like a lot of small towns.  But I didn’t grow up in any of those towns.  I didn’t learn to drive and graduate from high school or get married in those other towns.  It was Lawrenceburg, so this book has a close, personal feel to me.  I recognise the road names. I recognised many of the people.  He lived for a while on Caperton Avenue.  I was on the next street over.  An identically laid out wide avenue with a central strip adorned with dogwoods and well kept medium sized houses.  But it wasn’t just geographical coincidences.  Only through reading this did I realise just how closely our lives have touched, even if we’ve never met.  Obviously,  I knew that before given that my grandfather dated his former mother-in-law after they both found themselves widowed.   But reading the book made me appreciate more just how much lives are intertwined in a small town.  Through blood and marriage and circles of friends and shared experience and proximity.  But there were two areas of intersection with my family that I hadn’t known about and which I found fascinating.

Schism

Fred Thompson spends a good chapter of his book on Ol Time Religion and the lessons he learned at his home church, the First Street Church of Christ.

At the end of the well-kept avenue where I lived with my granddad, less than a hundred yards from my grandfather’s front door that, being small town Southerners we never used, stands the First Street Church of Christ.  My grandparents were Church of Christ.  Every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening, every Wednesday evening for Bible study and every other time the church doors opened my grandparents climbed into their Ford or Mercury and drove about a mile down the road to the Pulaski Street Church of Christ.   On the way to Pulaski Street, you might pass three or four churches that could have cut down on the commuting. Some of them had a distance in theological teachings that far outstretched the physical nearness.  But First Street was a Church of Christ and its quasi-industrial squared off brick structure was more aesthetically intriguing to me than the sloping brown front of Pulaski Street.  I wanted to know why we didn’t go to church there and asked my grandfather.  My granddad was indulgent and usually not short of a full explanation, but he told me in a tone the brooked no further questioning.  “Honey, we just don’t.”

Fred Thompson’s outlined the schism which was the reason behind the terseness.   From Fred’s perspective, the preacher at the center of it all had served enough time (Church of Christ preachers serve at the pleasure of the Elders and Deacons and traditionally not much more than itinerant) and was a little high handed when it was suggested that he’d served enough time.  And apparently there was a lot of ugliness.  My grandparents left that ever-so-convenient First Street and follow that preacher to the congregation at Pulaski Street.

Fred describes the schism thusly:

Soon our little congregation, having been purified though diminished in size, was back to normal.  Some of our friends in the more ‘sophisticated’ Catholic and Presbyterian churches, with whom we carried on constant good-natured, if serious, arguments over doctrine, referred to our congregation, after our split, as the poorer of the two congregations.  One of their more clever blasphemers was heard to say, “Their church is so poor that their members have to bring their own snakes on Sunday.”

That preacher was the man who shared a platform with me when I delivered my grandfather’s eulogy even though he’d long since moved on from Pulaski Street.  He buried my grandmother and he buried both of my cousins’ other grandparents, too (I couldn’t help but think that they must dread to see him coming.)   Delivering a eulogy and arranging the order of service at a funeral is an unpleasant task, but even through my grief I found him a pleasure to work with.   I remember sitting on my grandfather’s back porch on a warm May evening telling him on the phone that my mother had told me to keep my eulogy to seven minutes.  He told me “Well, there’s too long and there’s not long enough.  I’d give it a little more time.”   And he was right and it gave me the confidence to say what I had to say and not worry too much about time limits during a point in my life when I didn’t speak in public as much as I do now.   And it was good.

Union busting

While Fred was in law school, he came back to Lawrenceburg to clerk for his wife’s uncle during the most tumultuous summer that Lawrenceburg had ever seen. That year union organizers came to town.  The primary target was the biggest factory in town, but they thought they’d sweep up some of the smaller manufacturers while they were there, including Fred Thompson’s in-laws who owned a small factory making church furniture.  Unions and Southerners of primarily Scots-Irish decent don’t mix well. It’s my understanding that most of the workers voted against unionizing, but that the union men didn’t take no for an answer.  And then there was trouble. Big trouble.  Violence and blockades.

My grandfather was at the centre of that.  He served on the city council and was acting mayor at the time.  He played a part in organising a group of volunteers who bore arms and kept order in the town.   It was fascinating to read about that time from Thompson’s perspective.  Not one which differed much from my grandfather’s.  Thompson helped prepare the case brought by his in-laws, and my grandfather, too was involved a law suit but was defended by the company’s lawyers.   The judgment on my grandfather declared that he was enjoined “not to violate anyone’s civil rights, so long as he was not provoked.”

I captured my grandfather’s story of that summer in an oral history (here on Scribd  – starting on page 82)

A good read

And the book is really funny.  It captures that fantastic, classic Tennessee boy humor.  Dry.  A humor that waits. Funniest men on the planet, but you never know when it’ll hit you.  A Tennessee man says nothing for a long time, and then the funniest damn thing you’ve ever heard will come out deadpan, with barely a twinkle in his eye.  A quip that gives with one hand and takes with the other and leaves you thinking “Where the hell did that come from?”  Not that Fred has that sense of humor, not really.  He’s too much of a cut-up and a comic to dole out a joke meanly but with devastating effect.  But he captured it brilliantly, it’s like a ‘best of’ collection of cutting wit.

If you like politician’s memoirs, this book might be a bit of a disappointment in that there are few insights from the circles of power.  But if you just like a good tale, it’s an excellent read and does provide insight to the politician that Fred Thompson became.  And if you’re from Lawrenceburg, you really must read it.

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And USA finishes top of the Group and so go on to face Ghana in the next round.  Good? Maybe.

The last time the US played Ghana in the World Cup it was the last game of the group stages.   I was speaking at a performance management conference and though I had planned to sneak off for a little footie in the afternoon, it was at Earl’s Court and there wasn’t any place to go.  I planned to keep my head down and my eyes away from the Internet avoiding all talk of scores and watch the game replayed on the higher up channels of the satellite tv.

A good plan.

Until I got out of the train station at Tooting.  And I saw this:

There was literally dancing in the streets.  They were thrilled.  It was the first time they’d ever reached the knockout stages. Let’s hope the Ghanian community of Tooting are crying in their beers on Saturday.

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via dukenews.duke.edu

How does a gal from small town in Tennessee end up living in London and working with local government in England? It’s all down to Usenet, of course. And now it’s shutting down.

DURHAM, NC — This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago.

On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.

Life’s a funny old thing…You make one tiny decision and forever after you follow a different path in life. For me, joining Usenet discussions was one of those little divergences with a butterfly effect.

I met my husband, when he was a graduate student at Sheffield and I was a grad student at the University of Tennessee via a Usenet forum and Unix email. A quirk of the system meant a response to the forum was sent to my personal email. Online etiquette was touchy then…everyone was sensitive to flaming. I sent him a strongly worded email. We entered correspondence. We met up in person in Wales a few months later.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Posted via web from Ingrid’s posterous

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I’ve cut my brother’s hair a few times. Mostly when I was a teenager and he was just a little kid.  It never turned out well.  The most memorable occasion was when he about 8 and desperately wanted a crew cut which my mother would not allow.  He brought me a pair of blunt edged paper scissors and asked me to do the job.  I figured that if you just cut it short enough it would have the desired effect.  It turns out that this is not the case. I kept cutting and cutting and cutting, but it never looked right.  When my mother stopped me mid-job, it’s fair to say that the results were uneven.  Uneven as in near-bald in some places and tufty in others.  Being young and gullible, I told him that it looked good, and he believed me.  But it didn’t.  It looked like he had the mange.

Foolishly, seventeen years later, my brother asked me to cut his hair again.  It wasn’t so much that the memory had faded but that he was a bit desperate and assumed that my skills had improved. They hadn’t. But at least I had the right tools – a clipper and a set of guards.  But it turns out that good results are uni-directional.  If you run the clippers the wrong way, you still get the mange look.

And even more foolishly, even after seeing the results of my brother’s cut, my husband let me cut his hair.  It didn’t go well.  It was kind of a post-chemo look.  Apparently I told him that I knew I’d cut it too short in some places, so let some tufts remain in the hopes that it would even out the look.

My brother and husband with the proprietor of a country and western bar deep in the suburbs of Hamburg, Germany

I found this photo and showed it to my husband just before scanning it in.  He said “it does not convey the full horror of that haircut.”

So, even with the full knowledge of what my haircutting skills are like, he let me cut Bill’s hair this morning.

To be fair, the boy’s locks were getting very shaggy indeed.  And we’d already tried a couple of times to get his hair cut at the hairdresser around the corner who had done an excellent job back in December.

Shaggy, shaggy locks

So we got out the clippers this morning.  It all started out well enough.  But Bill soon tired of my clipping and decided we were done.  Although we weren’t.

I'm unlikely to become a licensed hairdresser

And even though it wasn’t a perfect job – a little rough around the edges and over the ears, Simon did say that Bill’s hair looked better after I finished than before I started. And then added that this must be a first for me.

I do it

Bill’s quite fond of power tools, and this was no exception.  He wanted to be the one with power.  He decided that he wanted to do the haircutting and was aggrieved when neither Simon nor I would agree to let him cut our hair.  But if there’s one thing I know about haircuts, it’s that you should never, ever agree to let anyone near your head unless you’re sure they know what they’re doing.

refusal often offends

He’s not crying because he’s having his hair cut.  He’s crying because he’s not doing the hair cutting.

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Facebook is a great way of promoting your town’s events.  The State of Tennessee has a great Facebook page to promote tourism.  But this question on my hometown’s Facebook fan page is just a little too Jeff Foxworthy and immediately draws some close to the bone humor.  Was this quite the effect they were hoping for?

Well, it’s Lawrenceburg, so you really never can tell.

(You may be a redneck if you, too, become a fan of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee)

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I remember my second time better than my first time.  The first time I think I stayed up quite late reading it – couldn’t sleep til I finished it.  I believe it was some time in the summer between my Junior and Senior year.  Maybe it was the year before.  Doesn’t matter.

I vividly remember the second time I read it or sorta read it.

Senior Year AP English our last assignment was to read and review some book of our choice.  We’d had plenty of notice.  The choice of books was long, two columns on a page if I recall correctly.  I chose Heart of Darkness because of all the great literary works on the list it had the fewest number of pages.  But it turns out it wasn’t a very fun read.  Who could have predicted?  By that point I’d done my SATs, been accepted to the college of my choice, and I no longer had much patience for the trivial demands of secondary education.

The night before the assignment was due I panicked. I did need to graduate.  And I probably also needed a reasonable grade in AP English or else I wouldn’t have been able to comp out of Freshman English in college (although I don’t think that occurred to me at the time).  I couldn’t face Heart of Darkness. Couldn’t have finished it and written up the report in twelve remaining hours either.

To make matters worse, I received a panicked phone call from my friend Keli.  She hadn’t read her book either.

Although neither of us still had the list of books in our possession, I remembered Catcher in the Rye was on the list and I had read that a year or two before (see at the beginning of the term I was still scholarly, elsewise I’d have picked something I’d already read from the start).  I resolved that we would write our book reports together.

I no longer even had a copy of the book – and since I grew up in a town without a bookstore and in an age without Internet or e-readers – this was a problem.  I called around and found someone with a copy. (Thank you John!)

We sat at Kentucky Friend Chicken and wrote the report paragraph by paragraph.  Or rather, I wrote both reports – varying them only slightly.

We handed them in in the nick of time the next morning.

Of course, we were seriously chancing our luck turning in nearly identical papers.  And to make matters worse, it turns out that Catcher in the Rye was not one of the books on the list.

Oops.

It was a phony list anyway.

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This year, I finally managed to edit and format the content (still not perfect – my proofing is inconsistent) and transform it into an actual book using Blurb.com self-publishing software.  The book itself wasn’t that expensive, but I think it turned out fairly nice.   I gave copies to my mother and aunt, my brother and two cousins – and my great-aunt – my grandfather’s sister for Christmas.

I’m not making any money on the book, but the beauty of blurb.com is that I could add a surcharge onto the price of the book – which I’d get to keep as ‘profit’.   I probably won’t add anything to the price – but I might – I reserve the possibility.  But I definitely won’t do so before 1 April 2010 – I’d like my more distant Powell cousins that I didn’t give copies to the option to buy their own at cost.

No little thing

Bill Powell in his …

By Ingrid Koehler, e…

Book Preview

And there will always be a free version available to download, too.  Here’s a version hosted on Scribd a document sharing website.  The content itself has been published under a Creative Commons license  – meaning that others can use and re-publish it for non-commercial purposes.

What’s in it?

There’s a lot of family history within the book – but within that there’s an interesting portrait of life in the rural South during the 20s and 30s.   It covers my grandfather’s college days at the University of Tennessee, his time working for one of FDR’s government agencies – the Farm Security Administration designed to relieve hardship during the depression, and his time fighting during WWII.  It covers his life as a businessman and a local politician in the 50s and 60s – including a period of labor unrest in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee – the Murray Ohio strikes.   And if I do say so myself, it’s a pretty good read.

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But it’s great to be reading all the stories my grandfather told me.   Mostly it’s been easy to identify chapters and divisions within the chapters because of his great story telling skills.  But occasionally there are these little snippets of stories that don’t really fit anywhere, often because I asked him a question that interrupted his flow.

On one occasion while the tape recorder was rolling I asked him about The Bloody Bucket.  It was a bar of some infamy in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee even though it must have been closed fornearly half a century before I ever heard of it.  I can’t remember how I did hear of it.  But, hear of it I did and, perhaps because of the name, it stuck in my mind.   And I asked my grandfather about it.  This is what he said:

Well, the Bloody Bucket, that was in Lawrence County, it was down there on Buffalo Road, George Stevens owned the land it was on.  And it was a very rough night club.  When I came to Lawrence County, they were just eliminatin’ the sale of beer in the county.  And I assume that they were or they had sold beer in the Bloody Bucket, anyway they fought a lot.  There were a lot of fights and people got drunk, and I’m not positive that somebody didn’t get killed in the Bloody Bucket, but they did in some of the beer joints around.  And it was just a place that had a bad name is all I know.

IK: Did you go in there?

BP: No.  I didn’t cull many places, but I culled that one.

Now, the funny thing about this is notthat there was a rough bar in Lawrence County, though when I grew up it was largely dry.  Yes there were some beer joints in the county, but you couldn’t buy nary a drop of alcohol inside the city limits and it was beer only even in the county.  Though Paul may have said to take a little wine for your health, the good representatives of Lawrence County weren’t taking any chances.     Rednecks are known to drink and sometimes they can get rowdy.  Nor is it that it was called “The Bloody Bucket”.  Though clearly branding in the 30s rural South is something different than what we know today (and apparently it was not the only drinking establishment by that name)

The funny thing is the last line.

My grandfather was a Christian man, church going, he studied the Bible and I never saw him take a drink in my life.  But he says “I didn’t cull many places…”  It’s hard for me to imagine my grandfather frequenting the  drinking dens of Lawrenceburg.   And I didn’t catch it when he said it, but when you’re transcribing you listen to every word.  It just goes to show that y ou tend to hear only what you expect to listen to.

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Although I knew he had been ill, gravely ill with liver failure.   I had emailed him at work when I heard he was in the hospital, but I don’t know if he ever got the message. It’s possible though, as he worked at a family business.

It’s hard to explain what was so cool about Terry. He was one of those guys that excel at “sports” played in the back of a bar, namely pool and cards. I don’t know how he was at darts but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was a consistent hitter of triple 20s.

One of my favorite memories is the time I beat Terry at pool. It was in the rec room of some University of New Orleans dormitory (we were down there for the national high scholl quiz bowl tournament, and we didn’t do well). I am generally a very bad pool player and he was great. But somehow I had a great moment and beat him. He was mad and blamed an uneven pool table and warped cues, but I didn’t care. I knew it was a fluke, but I didn’t care. I beat Terry.

I have lots of other memories of Terry, warm evenings playing cards, school trips. But perhaps the most vivid memory is the one where I tried to kill him.

Paula Morrisson Peek, Keli Heron, John Beuerlein, and me

(photo taken during the sports tournament, Paula uploaded this photo to Facebook yesterday and it brought it all back)

It was during the Law-Co-Hi Rook tournament. (Rook is a partnership bidding card game for 4, less complicated than Bridge, more complicated than Spades and how I happily passed many hours of my teenage life). Terry, an excellent card player, was partnered with another friend Derek, also excellent at cards and with a more stable temperament and demeanor which kept his hand well concealed. I was partnered with another quiz bowl friend, John.

John was a good player, solid and dependable, he understands the distribution. But he didn’t take the risks. (He’s a doctor now in Knoxville, the kind of guy you’d want for a doctor). Anyway, maybe this sounds conceited, but the only competition I was worried about in that tournament was Derek and Terry.

Well, we met in the tournament before the finals as it happens. As I remember, John and I weren’t winning, I could see how the game was going, but we were still a threat. Terry began taunting me, trying to get me to throw my game. It worked.

I snapped. I lunged across the great octagonal library table – and it was only its great width that kept me from reaching him and wrapping my hands around his throat in a single great movement. He just laughed as the teachers rushed over to break up the “fight”.

I was ejected from the tournament for “bad sportsmanship” – and of course that meant my partner had to go, too. I explained that to John that we were losing anyway, but he didn’t buy it (I don’t blame him!)

Anyway, I realise that those stories are maybe a little unflattering on Terry (and maybe on me, too), but that was ok – that was what was cool about him. He was funny and clever and he knew how to punch your buttons, but in the end you knew that was just how he played the game. And it was fun. And I feel sick that I lost touch with him.

He died young, barely in his 30s, and left a wife and two kids behind.

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