Saturday Nights Were Special
So, I am checking FaceBook the other day and I see the note that one of my friends had become a fan of “Superstar” Billy Graham. (No, not the Billy Graham who was arguably the greatest preacher of the 20th century, but the one who was the electrifying, muscle-bound wrestler of the 1970′s.) I followed the link to Superstar’s FaceBook page and this flood of memories, long forgotten, came bubbling up from the deep, dark recesses of my brain.
Superstar Billy Graham
The images are grainy and a bit blurred, like old photos from a cheap camera. But they remain somewhat intact in my mental family photo album. And it has been fun to rediscover them, shake the dust off of them, and sift through them again after all these decades.
I suppose I should begin at the beginning. Not the very beginning. Just the beginning of this particular page in the Strother family photo album…
It was circa 1974 and Dad was about to rock our world. I was at home alone when his Chevy pickup pulled into the pea gravel circle drive in front of our pale yellow, wood-framed house. Dad was laying on the horn.
I came charging out the front door, figuring he wanted me to unload groceries or mow that dadgum acre-sized lawn of ours. He didn’t want either of those things. He wanted me to help him unload our new treasure.
Now, THAT is a TV!
That treasure was a Zenith Trinitron® console color TV! We had never had anything more than a little black and white TV with rabbit ears. We lived three miles outside of Mineral Wells, Texas, and the only channels we could pick up were the three main Dallas/Fort Worth affiliates and a couple of their local channels…and only when the wind wasn’t blowing adversely.
That new television – and the big, tall, adjustable antenna dad had professionally installed on the roof of our house – changed our family life. Suddenly, this whole new world of network programming was available. Dad’s favorite programs were westerns like Gunsmoke and Big Valley or detective shows like Barnaby Jones or The Rockford Files.
But the thing I was most excited about – and the main reason dad had sprung for the TV – was that now I could watch NFL football (especially the Cowboys) every Sunday afternoon and Monday night during the football season, and I could even catch NCAA games on Saturday afternoons.
You see, prior to that purchase, I had spent practically every weekend away from home. I would go to my friends’ houses to watch the games on their TVs. My Dad forever claimed that the main reason he bought the beautiful new Zenith was to keep his boy home sometimes.
Dad was never a football fan. He was into cars. I liked cars well enough, but I was a football junkie. Dad forced himself to sit down and watch the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday and – at least until his 10 o’clock bedtime – he even watched Monday Night Football with me. He didn’t always stop down for the games, and I didn’t mind. I knew it wasn’t his bag.
Hee Haw!
We did find common ground, however, on Saturday night, a historically slow night for network TV. (It can also be a slow night for kids who don’t yet drive.) Saturday night was special. It was the one night of the week Dad and I both loved every single thing on our TV. It started at 6pm with Hee Haw, the hilarious country music and humor show featuring Buck Owens, Roy Clark, and the most beautiful girls to ever pop out of a cornfield and sing out, “Heeee Haaaw.”
Following Hee Haw, we watched the Saturday Night Western Movie of the Week. And then the night cap, the coup de grace, the perfect ending to any week…Saturday Night Wrestling from the Sportatorium in Dallas.
Sportatorium
Man! What fun.
Now, this was long before the wrestling explosion that would grip the youth of the nation in the ’90′s. Back in the 1970′s, wrestling was big, but it was regional. Different organizations operated in the various regions of the country. And there was no bigger, no hotter hotbed for wrestling than that old, sweaty, barnlike edifice in downtown Dallas called the Sportatorium.
Such colorful characters as “Superstar” Billy Graham (the Hulk Hogan or The Rock of his era), Flying Red Bastien, Andre the Giant, and a host of others patrolled the canvas, issuing threats, settling old scores, and winning world championship titles.
Some of the combatants were evil and had to wear masks. Others were good and wore white shorts to prove it. All were entertaining. There were flying drop kicks, hammer locks, death chokes, and, of course, the most famous and deadly maneuver of them all…Fritz Von Erich’s Iron Claw.
Fritz Von Erich's Iron Claw
Dad and I laughed and cheered and jeered every match and every move. It was our time together. We both knew it was a lot of nonsense. That knowledge, however, never stopped us from loving the wrestlers we loved and despising the ones we despised.
(Sigh.) Precious memories. Some linger. Others pounce on you unexpectedly when you see a photo or hear a name…a blast from your past.
I guess the next time my wife and one of our daughters is watching yet another silly reality TV show together and choosing their favorite contestant and engaging in animated discussions about the contest, I will try and remember Saturdays nights with my dad…and not make such a fuss about them finding yet another silly show to watch together.
Maybe someday they will blog – or do whatever people will be doing thirty years from now to chronicle their lives – about American Idol, Hell’s Kitchen or So You Think You Can Dance and how sweet it was to just be there with their mom.
Unbroken
Morning Devotion
I have just returned from a family gathering on my mother’s side. My Aunt Nelda and Uncle James hosted it on their gorgeous, sprawling west Texas ranch. They called it Camp Granky, in honor of my maternal grandmother (whom I named as a toddler when I could not manage calling her “Granny,” which my dad wanted to get me to call her, just to aggravate her, because she said she was much too young and pretty to be a granny – and she was right). What a time we had!
All of us cousins are grown now. We have our own families. We are scattered across three states. We seldom see each other. So, this gathering was like rolling back the clock to a simpler time.
Many of the most vivid memories of my childhood revolve around a white framed parsonage in Mineral Wells, Texas. The humble home of Big Granddad and Granky was always abuzz around the holidays. Most every Thanksgiving and Christmas, their four daughters and their families would converge on the little house (though it seemed, as everything in childhood does, much bigger to me then) and it would come alive with their laughter and chatter. The only son, like me, was still a kid.
Aunt Nelda
We were a family. Tight-knit. Kindred spirits. And loud. Some families are quiet, reserved and sophisticated. They sip their coffee or wine and speak in hushed tones about the state of this or that. Not us. If you were quiet at the Henager family gathering, you went unheard. We were too busy laughing at the silliness of Granky or Aunt Nelda…or a corny joke told by one of the dads.
The adults were busy shuffling the dominoes and trash-talking their way through another game of 42. The kids were trying to remain unpranked by Uncle Troy (that son who was still a kid, but the oldest one). Then there were the endless ping pong tournaments between the male cousins and our uncles. There were backyard football games, where a flash of brilliance could forever establish you as a Henager family Hall of Famer.
Granky and the women were baking things that filled the air with their sweet aromas and tasted like pure slices of heaven. Big Granddad could often be found peeling pecans with his pocket knife…the same one he sometimes used to trim his fingernails.
Kids Everywhere!
My wife was sort of the unofficial photographer, chronicling the revelings of Camp Granky ’09. Last night, I sifted through those pictures, savoring every precious moment. Admittedly, it wasn’t the same as back when. Big Granddad and Granky are gone. So is Dad. A couple of the uncles are no longer in the picture. One of the sisters and the brother couldn’t make it. Some old faces were missing and plenty of new faces were there. Little rugrats, the offspring of the cousins and their mates, were everywhere. Watching them laugh and play and fuss and cry reminded me of us back then.
Time takes its toll. Everything, it seems, changes. People change. But love…love never dies. The strong family bond remains. The faith of our fathers and mothers remains the strong cord that binds…every bit as much as sharing a gene pool.
And the circle remains.
Unbroken.
Is Forrest Gump Smarter Than Barack Obama?
I Have a Statement!
I am going to go ahead and make a snap judgment here and say that men in authority ought not make snap judgments and brash statements. It seems that our current president is finding that it is much easier to be a rock star and make carefully crafted speeches with the aid of a monitor than it is to be the insightful leader he claimed he would be.
So far, Obama has been more incite-ful than insightful. While in the midst of ramming his socialist agenda down the throats of the American people, he stopped down to give commentary on an unfortunate incident, saying that a Cambridge policeman who arrested the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates acted “stupidly.” He may be right. I don’t know for sure, because, like him, I don’t know exactly what went down on Mr. Gates’ front porch.
What I do know is that the so-called leader of the free world acted stupidly when he – no doubt feeling the pressure of militant minority leaders who have lamented his lack of attention to their agendas – felt it necessary to knee-jerk and offer an official statement and stance on the incident. Yes, official. When the president of the country makes a statement about anything, he does so “officially,” especially when the statement is measured and delivered as this one was.
This is the president’s statement as reported on Boston.com:
“Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played. . . . But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,’’ the president said. “That’s just a fact.’’
I have no beef with some of what Obama said. But when you read his opening remark, the qualifier – “I don’t know, not having been there…” – you might anticipate that he would curb his enthusiasm for lowering the hammer of “acted stupidly” on the head of a man who was in a situation the president knew nothing about. His conclusion is as stupid as any act he might have been judging. To say “I don’t know,” and then declare, they “acted stupidly” shows a lack of judgment and a faulty line of reasoning.
The result of Obama’s statement was that law officials and their representative groups across the country felt insulted and undermined by the chief executive of the land.
Quoting from Boston.com:
Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas said yesterday that his department was “deeply pained’’ and his officers “very much deflated’’ by Obama’s remark. “It deeply hurts the pride of this agency,’’ he said at a news conference, where he defended Crowley’s actions.
The world loves to laugh at George W. Bush, the man who could hardly open his mouth without butchering the language in some capacity. Tired of the belly-laughing, we Americans elected ourselves an “intellectual,” a man of letters. And what does he do before the paint is even dry on the White House walls? He makes fun of the disabled on The Tonight Show and then undermines police work everywhere by uttering his vitriolic assessment of the way one officer did his job.
Good thing he is so smart and able to weasel his way out of these verbal gaffes…or he would look pretty, um, stupid.
Like Forrest Gump’s momma said, Mr. President, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
And now for an honest, thoughtful, and thought-provoking commentary on the subject…
And Did She Fly?
There is a nagging pain inside me today.
Yesterday, it finally happened. We loaded up her things and moved my Holly 150 miles down I-30 to Texarkana. Sure, it was time. She has paid her dues, gotten her education, worked hard to establish a life for herself, and now she is set to take flight.
I know that some may read this and roll their eyes. They will think, “Come on, Gene. She is 25. You have to let go sometime.”
Master's Degree!
I couldn’t care less what such people think, to be honest. I give no weight to the judgment of those who laugh about your shoes hurting your feet when they have never taken a single step in those shoes. Where were they the morning she entered the world and our lives were forever changed by the simple words of a now-faceless nurse? Where were they when I waited for twelve hours in the surgery waiting room while her spine was reconstructed? Where were they when I scratched her belly with a coat hanger because she itched in that pink body cast she was stuck in for a full year? Where were they when I listened to her cry herself to sleep and then did the same myself?
Most everyone who meets her now falls in love with her on some level. They immediately recognize her depth, her beauty, her spirit, her wisdom. Those attributes did not come accidentally. There has been a lifetime of birth pangs in their delivery. But she has become…and now she is.
She needs me less than she ever has before. For that, I am both grateful and sad. Old habits die hard. So, pardon me if I take a moment to be lonely. Pardon me if there is a twinge of sadness at her departure. Pardon me if I wish I was still in the next room the next time she needed me.
But at the end of this journey, the question will not be whether her mother and I feathered the nest, or how we nurtured her. The question will be…
“Did she fly?”
I think I already know the answer…and I thank God for it.
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The JourneyMan by D. Gene Strother is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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