A recent picture-taking jag dating back to my visit to the warm climes of San Diego as it rained in tropical Monsoon-style back in Louisville – where it was also warmer, lol – lets me catch up with events of a very modest and most natural nature.

We’ll begin with something serious.

(Know also that left clicking on pictures can enlarge them. Clicking twice on some of these makes it even cooler) 😉

Moving right along, what follows is more or less random. For everyone’s Peace of Mind, having said that, I think it might be best to begin with at least one other picture of San Diego flora before we launch into the natural homeliness of a Kentucky Winter……a season I have found fascinating this year for some reason or another……..

The brilliance of succulents in general but of the understandably common Ice Plants in particular, have always completely grabbed my attention. Mixed into this picture is a rather ungainly Yucca/Aloe specimen which somehow manages to make the grade owing to its brilliant blooms. A nasty creature with amazingly sharp little pricks on the succulent-like leaves, I could be an ideal addition to a garden which someone spent too much time in. Just backing into could be the lesson of a lifetime. 😉

Moving along now and recalling the downpour I described “back in Kentucky” during my coastal doings, in my return, I took a trip up the road a very small piece to visit one of my favorite Louisville parks – Beckley Creek Park. A part of a greater park system of recently constructed vintage, this park shines as an outstanding example of the new movement of city parks everywhere going “natural”.

Here is the Beckley Creek Portion, complete with its own website:
http://www.theparklands.org/Parks/Beckley-Creek-Park 

This fascinating, $120 Million park system has become a deep and quantitatively huge geographical investment as an urban feature. Complete with walking and biking trails which will eventually comprise a 100 mile circle around Louisville, the islands of concentrated activity mix a delightfully-landscaped and architecturally pleasing bunch of elements together with a cleaned-up and only-somewhat-groomed natural environment.

Where the absurd richness of the Spring, Summer and Autumn’s deciduous glories abound in Kentucky, I was also pleased to see the contrast of Minimalist Landscaping Designs around the buildings of the park. Used for many purposes – from weddings and parties to your standard average dog park to conventions and educational experiences drawing Nature Lovers, the park answers the bell with resounding merits.

From the other side of this building, we see the “Real” reason for its location, while this side of it expresses some genuine art for design freaks such as myself. Considering the dull gray skies and apparent skeletons of trees so common in a Kentucky Winter landscape, the dried old grasses, the solitary limestone boulder and the now-barren and ruined bed of perennial flowers and scrawny shrubs in the foreground still manage to gather the eye in a most-rewarding way.

Here, then, is the other side of the same building:

And here is a better look at the creek it sits beside, now still somewhat swollen from the aforementioned rains. Yes, that is a working farm and barn in the distance.

The creek I found totally fascinating. There are roughly a billion and one ways to view the creek itself, all within walking distance from parking spots along the road coursing through the park. As an historical presence, Beckley Creek has lots of historical stories, from Revolutionary times onward.

Closer to the Shelbyville Road entrance is my favorite perspective. A short walk from the car leads you though a path into an entire world of creekness. Huge Sycamore, Hickory and Walnut trees abound, as well, in summer, as a near-impenetrable set of bushes and shrubs, many of whom flower at different times of the warmer year, some of which are an allergy sufferer’s nightmare, such as Goldenrod in profuse quantities.

But it is this past Winter we are dealing with now. Here is a deceptively passive-looking creek view back upriver under so many now-barren deciduous trees……..

What seems rather placid from this particular angle is really not so much. The higher water is typically brown like this from the collection of silts alongside the water frm rain runoff. What it can provide is a somewhat amazing sensuality as this liquid mass gets yet another angle:

The storm’s after effects are vivid:

Those collected leafs, caught in the spines of naked shrubbery testify to the incredible force brought to bear in the rushing floodwaters of that week.The height is completely telling – it was high!

Alongside the trail down to this area, I noticed other damage.

A completed cycle of growth and death stand right in front of us as we see the demise of a once-strapping young buck of a tree toppled over by the erosion at its base. It’s neighbor, already ancient beside it, stands drunkenly alongside a new aspirant, completing what was for me at the time a very moving tableau – a story of raw nature, cycles, time and the surprises in store for us all, tree or no tree. While there seems to be ugliness galore in the plain and uninteresting colors shown at this time of the year – and at such odds with the more outrageously vivid beauty and fullness for the other 3 seasons – the mind gets stricken by thoughts of passages in this gloom. This is merely one of the lessons available at this gorgeously abundant park.

Well, as luck would have it, then I came home to this rewarding scene:

And there was another treat in store as well. Tom;s daughter Meagan and her man Jeff had sent an Amaryllis plant to us for Christmas. Not only that, but a Chocolate cake that was so rich, only I could handle it!! 😉 Which I did, for the record, like that would fool anyone who knows me.

I had a tough time getting pictures of the Amaryllis exactly right, but I managed a few as it began blooming, the first one recognizable as shot with a flash at night……..:

Later, now ensconced safely and semi-permanently on Mother’s desk, daylight helped show off its color and textural softness:

Obviously, I really like the plant, as do the rest of us.

OK. Here’s a random Stork at the Portland, Oregon Chinese Garden. I’m a Stork fan. 😉

And this here is a look upward inside Gaudi’s massive 120 year old construction project of a catherdral in Barcelona. I thought they did that well, personally.

This picture is especially interesting when enlarged. I am sure Antonio intended this. 😉

As a pageant, football has few rivals. And high school football has its very own style, especially in growing small towns still large enough to have 3 other major rival high schools. Bands, cheerleaders, big dances after, all the somewhat drunk or just fun-loving friends going purposefully loco, already in party mode, City fathers, businessmen and their families, families of teachers and girl friends – just packed with respect for and and enjoying participation as good fans of the team. Cheering for them. Good times. 😉

This is the part where I discover my 155 pound self at Owensboro Senior High wearing pads, a helmet and curiously enduring the weird surprise of finding my ankles being taped in serious manner by the team manager, minutes before one of those Friday Night football games. Having endured the “game meal” with the other guys – super dry burnt steak and other forgettable tasteless items – in the cafeteria and having hung out for long hours, just laying down and relaxing to an illegal degree which a home game allows – the forced relaxation of the powers that be – and then finally the lights come on, a crowd can be detected and we run out onto the field to wild applause.

(I remember thinking how the crowd often seemed to determine the play, which I know is bunk, but the sheer scale of this event seems so overwhelming at times. It’s a pretty awesome experience – like a shower of manna on an apprehensive head and shoulders – and which seems to gift an unparalleled ferocity when it is required. It also awards a feeling of invincibility, for better or worse. These are your 100% moments. For real, some of the accomplishments of players are way beyond what they do in practices.)

I touched the ball in actual games 3 times as a high school football player. I caught a pass and ran back two kickoffs, one of them opening a game in Tell City which I ran back 45 yards. We were rather, ahem, run-oriented with Dicky Moore and Frank Chambers in the backfield. One would gain 200 yards in a game and the next week, the other one would. We basically battered teams into the ground. Even weirder is the fact that our other back, a guy named Wee Wee Moorman, weighed 220 pounds and could run with the force of the sun. Wee Wee was the biggest guy on the team. I know his body well – these guys are who I tackled in practice for 2 long years. Scrimmages were live in practice and “game situations” were always played. 1st and 10, 3rd and long – that sort of thing.

Here is what football taught me: The human thigh is the biggest and baddest muscle in the human body. Tackling guys like our very excellent backs who were the dual offensive feature of that team – as well as tackling Wee Wee – took place 2-3 times a week in live, full-on, vicious scrimmages. The only compliments one got on defense were for hard hits and bring downs, smiling while the guy in charge of blocking you got chewed out for screwing up. It gets a bit contagious. Memories of practices are fairly vivid actually, at least generally. I remember dirty white practices jerseys, complete with some remnants of soil already earned. I remember developing strategies for facing these running backs, playing as either a safety or cornerback in the practice defense. I remember my first collision with Dickie, facing an incredible force which hit me lots harder than I hit it. I bounced off of him but managed to catch his foot and trip him. I thought it was fairly creative of me. It was always a mnemonic highlight for me, that little series. Like a hidden secret but real success.

The first time I got either knocked out or just slobberknocked into and out of the pain world was actually in junior high when I broke my nose courtesy of a middle linebacker as I ran the ball up the middle and who hit me in the face mask, lol – with his. I have been knocked “woozey” a few times. It seems to me to be the nature of the game. But the King of My Hits came in a game in Louisville, played at Atherton High. We played Louisville St. Xavier, a state power at the time.

For some reason or other I started the game on a defensive kickoff. I remember feeling strange. As we kickoff and the ball settles into the returner’s – Dicky Lyons of UK and Oakland Raider fame – hands, the play develops where my man somehow got completely lost and I found myself facing a dude packing the ball, coming straight at me. I ran forward and launched myself into him, head-on. I made the tackle – I hit him right solid on the thigh -.and someone said I got all sorts of props for doing it running back to the bench.

But I wasn’t there.

I remember next seeing the time left on the clock from the sidelines and wondering where the first quarter went. I had been out on my feet for a half hour at least. It was a completely weird situation and then the coach called my name and back out I went. I couldn’t shake the weirdness, but I played OK and quite a lot in a tight battle that we lost, 13-7.

On the ride back in the team bus, I remember I faced a serious anxiety about vulnerability. I felt incredibly alone. My head began hurting about halfway through the ride and it stayed that way for the next day. That collision began my divorce from the sport, which I formalized my senior year, quitting the team at the start of practices.

I never even mentioned it, aside from telling my friends how weird it felt. I actually considered it normal – which it was, lol, among players – but I remember the resulting anxiety to this day. I remember Coach Gerald Pointer had someone go out and find me following my not reporting for play at the start of my senior year. I was definitely penciled in as a starter. Ironically, I was playing around at baseball with friends at the Wesleyan diamond when Jimmy Musick rode up and told me the coach wanted to see me. (We had just that week finished a long and fairly successful American Legion baseball season, losing in the State Final to Ashland). When I got in front of the coaching staff at our practice headquarters, Coach Poynter (who I have always liked immensely unto this very day), went ahead and asked why I didn’t report.

“I’m a baseball player, coach.” Then  I smiled (like a real baseball player would). 😉

I looked them all right in the face and I told them that I was investing in something I do well. I don’t want to get hurt for playing a sport I really don’t much like in the first place. I mentioned I like the team and that hurt the most about quitting.

They gave me a pass. They listened and understood. I have zero bad feelings about any of them – to the contrary.

My father, however, was incensed, and probably more because he knew I had made what he thought was a rash decision all on my own. The truth is, that’s true. Before I sat in front of the coaches, my decision on the matter may have been 2 hours old. But it truly came from the heart, that’s all I can say.

I had a great fall, doing things normal people do, lol. I even got a job pumping gas. Marcia Roby and I made a few road games together. Good times. 😉

at least until baseball season. 😉

Landscaping for me has been an inter-regional experience. From my origins in the trade dating from 1971 in Vancouver, BC, to my move to California in 1985, to Reno, Nevada just after the Quake, lol,  interspersed with Portland, Oregon a couple of times, I have encountered widely varied climates and geologies. Discovering the “fault lines” of zonal horticultural tolerances never had a more avid experimenter. Sometimes, of course, this might happen by accident.

(Click to enlarge)

Grasses might seem like a strange introduction to “bloom designing”, but color in a landscape is everything. Note also, a splendid shape also satisfies the senses. Mixed with exotic coloring, grasses are absolutely the equal of any bloom, anywhere.

Above………………..This gorgeous Purple Fountain Grass performed as an annual in Reno, dying out – literally – as the cold, dry Winters there reduced their distribution to “annual-type” plantings. A hardier version, of course, has been hybridized since I was roaming the dirt at my old pace. But what I found to lessen the pain was courtesy of Francis – I began replacing the Purple Fountain Grasses with “Muhley Grass” – an exceptionally satisfying alternative. Time and experience taught me much – including some face-saving error replacement. 😉

Planted even just casually to take up some space, this grass became a huge favorite of mine, offering an incredible and long-lasting hot pink bloom for – often – a couple of months at a time.

The Northwest US and Canada

Amateur climatoligists and horticulturists are often amazed at the immense diversity of available plantings in what would seem cold and hostile Northwest environments. Everyone of course understands the “rain issues” as a given there, but what they may miss is the moderate nature of the climate in general. It rarely freezes hard owing to a benign ocean current which is not only responsible for bringing clouds and rain, but also for keeping Winter temperatures far more moderate than those of their cousins to the East.

Yes, there is a definite season of Winter, involving very cool temperatures and a ton of rainfall for long months, but what results is a horticultural Heaven. The mad insane tampering with rhododendron hybrids of the English for a few centuries, fresh from the exports of Tibetan color, where the rhodies do not just bloom the local native purple of the United States, have resulted in absolutely stunning bloomage.

Such a wild variety of color splashes lasting weeks is the Springtime unfolding of the Northwest floral bounty.

Other plants join in forcefully, as they mature as street trees and border plantings…………

Here, a venerable Vancouver side street shows off its street plantings in dramatic fashion:

Actually, Vancouver is nearly over planted in Springtime blooms, if such a thing can be said.

The classical mixes easily with the ultra-modern, as Vancouver so often presents………..

Reno also has a mad love affair with blooming Cherries and Chinese Pears, especially along the River Walk..

I have added to Reno’s affair with blooms in designs of my own:

I have always tended to plan for “the profuse” look at blooms in projects of my design. I enjoy experimenting with variegated plantings, mixed with off color conifers like Atlas Blue Cedars. Variety, sometimes aroma-driven depict my own personal style, an amalgam of experience and shameless puttering.
That’s it for now……….I’ll fly away soon………

I mean, there are so many options out there….which way to go??

On The Road in High School Baseball Owensboro, Kentucky – 1964

Some memories are more vivid than others. Baseball memories are the secrets grown men cultivate at the oddest of times, perhaps akin to women who recall their first successful recipe concoctions as young girls and witnessing with a secret glow the satisfied engorging of their intended munchers, where burps were secretly tolerated as signs of pleasure.

Among the game time memories of great hits, utter failures at dreadful times both at the plate and in the field when the merest fielding of a tricky bouncing ball seemed unusually alien – when observing pitchers became so fascinating in its own right as their own unique dramas unfolded and I became entranced by their attitudes …………….of heroic moments and also of the myriad of timeless and monotonous moments in baseball, sitting on the bench between plays, playing tricks on other players, listening to the obnoxious frivolity of us all and smiling………….while acquiring a wisdom allowed by the idle reflection baseball insists on……enjoying the warmth and camaraderie of teammates, coaches, managers like C.E. Beeler, Roy Kennedy or Jimmy Musick, and those fans who followed us so closely…. Life in an enclosed, protective bubble toiling at an insignificant game and feeling like a relative giant. In love with life itself.

My very first road trip in high school baseball occurred at the advent of Spring Break in 1964. It was the beginning of the muscle car era in America which only lasted about a decade until the Arab Embargo crisis made the world aware of the prolificacy of wasting oil. Owensboro’s other eventual sporting primacy – NASCAR road racing – was just then collecting its eventual memory as our good friends Darryl Waltrip and Army Armstrong began ripping it up at their particular sporting excellence and Bill Sterrett of hydroplane fame introduced multiple Chrysler engines inside the power drives of those magnificent, deadly beasts of speed. I recall visiting Terry Sterett, Bill’s son, at his house and peering into the back of a full-size semi-trailer pulled to races from Miami to Seattle. Inside stood 8 humongous engines on locked racks, all these Chrysler Hemi, blown behemoths, each undoubtedly worth a fortune and all supplied by the business of Chrysler as Sterett began winning highly-publicized races shown on Wide World of Sports with Jim Whitaker and an adoring and avid announcing team, so fit for Sunday afternoon TV. Each individual motor evidently produced over 1100 Horsepower in its own right. It was truly a motorhead’s dream and even I, driver of a small absurd-but-eventful Valiant station wagon with its push button drive and Slant Six motor, could appreciate the sheer mechanized mayhem of that Motherlode of power.

The cars themselves were often the storyline during those days. Huge, heavy and incredibly comfortable, these powerful Pontiac station wagons, even Jack Hick’s memorable Oldsmobiles, or Jake Winkler’s many Lincoln Continentals, they all contained these massive power trains, easily-achieved 100 MPH speeds.and were the absolute embodiment of the concept of “living rooms on wheels” which the interstates and vastly improved side roads offered at the time – and which got even better. It was a period of nearly obscene automotive luxury and we were just the guys to drink it all in.

My first road trip then, 120 miles to Paducah through the gorgeousness of the Kentucky Lake region amid the fluttering lime green leaves of early Spring amid the aroma of freshly-tilled fields of loamy, silty farmers’ soil and the syrupy pleasure of inhaling dogwoods and redbud blooms, so rich in pollen, included me in an unnamed vehicle which now is misty as hell to recall. The subsequent trips became memorable for other reasons, but the first one is only memorable because of events on the field as well as the return trip and our visit to a restaurant.

On the field, Ford Cox, the starting shortstop, broke his finger in infield drills prior to the game and I found myself playing among my local heroes. I had just a few practice grounders….and absolutely no concept of much of anything except my thrill at being included on the team itself on the trip in the expectation of being able to watch the phenomenon of Owensboro Baseball from the bench. My expectations were totally nil in other words, and I was simply thrust into the prime activity like a deer in the headlights. I absolutely surprised myself in my nervousness when my first 2 at-bats produced hits. My first ground ball was utterly memorable as well, as routine as it was. With Jimmy Howes pitching, someone fisted a slow rolling grounder at me which I gobbled up and threw out to David Anderson at first base. Each of those quite ordinary baseball experiences I now recount as major recollections, as mundane as they may have seemed to onlookers. My secret thrill at being competent frankly surprised me among these legends of my youth. I recall a bursting feeling of secret ecstasy while chattering it up at shortstop as Jimmy Howes nodded at me for good plays and Jack Hicks gave full-throated acknowledgment. It was a ridiculously heady moment – and a doubleheader, no less, as we swept both games and began our journey back home to Owensboro.

Our trip was destined to include a stop at this very well-known restaurant hard by Kentucky Lake which offered an all-you-can-eat supply of catfish steaks. Good Lord, we must have ruined their profit line!! Sitting in this glow of inclusion after succeeding in a team sport, I sat, smiling, collecting memories and impressions on this first visit to Heaven which I hoped I would never lose. I implicitly understood the momentousness of my thrill. When someone mentions they had to pinch themselves to remind themselves they did indeed exist in such a reality, I was the poster boy for the concept. I had been to baseball heaven and, man oh man, it was very, very good.

Players of substantial size and appetites were on that team. The 6’ 5” Jim Howes, state discus champion; Frank Chambers, a High School All American football running back; 6’ 3” Herbie Kendall, he of the bottomless stomach; 6’ 4” Larry Shown, another huge guy and quite an impressive eater; it turned out……and the rest of us…..hugely wasted from two games without a bite for over 7 hours, we set upon those delicious steaks like rats just off a ship. The tireless waitress was completely enthralled by our appetites, smiling widely in some real awe, laughing in a very cool spirit and endlessly circulating to the next of 20 of us who had arrived famished and intrigued by the menu. I even remember the chef coming out, simply to witness this attack on his food as he stood, smiling at the absurdity of his restaurant’s largesse and the frenzy of chewing taking place in this holiest of catfish steak climes. (We stopped here every trip for 3 years, for the record. We were also quite remembered by the staff, ha ha.) Hush puppies were also on the menu, fabulously mixed with the deep fried steaks in some real genius of preparation and taste. In the end, the restaurant’s catfish and hush puppy stocks must have looked like the aftermath of Sherman’s March To The Sea.

As we embarked on the finale of this road trip, many of us were borderline sick, we were so full. It became a far quieter group of boys who finally descended on Owensboro, including this “new” shortstop who had one whale of a story to deliver to his totally supportive family. My giddiness over the experience never really left me. I take it into today and tomorrow like the memory of a kiss from a real Goddess. It is one of the most timeless gifts I have ever entertained, maybe even better than my first kiss or my first you-know-what. It’s in that league of events, anyway. Yes, of course – I am referring to my first 8 RBI game. 😉 Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Well, the season wore on and I began a bonding with my mates which inspired me forever. Jim Howes, the undisputed team leader, took a real shine to his new shortstop and I began spending time with he and his younger brother Danny at their home on Jackson Street in Owensboro. It led to an entirely close relationship with Danny, another 3 sport athlete like me who was in my sophomore class at the time, and with whom I shared accommodation later, rooming together at Murray State as freshmen.

In Owensboro Senior High School, Jack Hicks had advised me early on to opt to take classes which excluded the sixth period. The reason for that was because we often headed out then, on local road trips to venues within 30-40 miles such as Beaver Dam, Dale or Chrisney or Huntingburg, Indiana, among many others, to get the in time to take batting and infield practice preceding each game. And this is where the experience of road trips took off on a fabulously rich tangent.

Left Fielder Don (“PooPoo”) Wetzel had this magnificent blue-green full-sized late model Chevrolet convertible which delivered players in high style to all these sites. Inasmuch as there were truly only minor cliques on these teams, one of them surrounded Poo Poo’s car for road trips. Somehow, I found myself included, along with the irrepressible David Anderson, always so ready for laughs, JJ Pulliam my fellow middle infielder, the Howes brothers, Frankie Chambers – and an otherwise rotating crowd of fun lovers who spent the entirety of the trips doing ridiculously funny things, trolling gossip, of course about the girls we all were interested in, and performing random acts of minor vandalism and occasional real-life world class humor. Needless to say, tricks on each of us were de rigeur. The talk was a constant babble of bonding teenagers, jokes were told at a frenetic pace and many was the time where we arrived at our destination to our major surprise, wondering how time could possibly have passed so quickly.

This next story is apocryphal only because I didn’t witness it, but it was said that Frankie was in dire need to relieve himself, yet the dilly dallying done before leaving had caused the car to be late and Jack would always become dangerously incensed when players arrived after the desired caravan’s arrival. In an effort to please everyone, someone put their feet on Frankie’s behind to better force his works outward as he peed out the window in hopes to avoid contacting the car’s lustrous finish. Well, it seems the driver’s irrepressible impishness had no barrier at the possibility of a laugh and he pulled over at a store along the way where a few gentlemen were sitting out front. Frankie was apoplectic – “Let me back in!!” – to a firmly pushing teammate, whose feet were enjoined by another’s. “Come on, dammit, I’m done!!” as they pressed forward relentlessly. Finally, the driver sped forward again as Frankie was released, his temporary anger only diminished by his acute embarrassment. The car, of course, was rolling in devilish laughter, as they sped back to avoid Jack’s ire.

C.E. Beeler – team manager – also had a famous convertible rig – a small red Corvair convertible which always carried packs of people during Friday and Saturday nights, to the Dairy Drive In and to his home, where a few of us learned to smoke cigarettes – not the best result of this sporting enterprise, yet a weird bonding experience in its own right. His car always pumped out the reigning choices of music of the day – typically, Soul R&B, which included the Temptations and their huge hits which we had all learned to choreograph and perform in C.E.’s living room. He also drove to away games and offered yet another open air experience for those near-toxic lush Spring days.These 2 automotive options offered 12 people the fullest experiences of intoxicating travel and the absurdly rich experiences implicit in driving up to small venues to admiring eyes.

It was a bourgeois heaven, of no small notoriety. One of the more amazing road trip experiences occurred later, when we caravanned to another away game – I believe Hopkinsville – traveling through rough and impenetrable forests at breakneck speeds. Sitting in Bobby Hupp’s car, Tommy Jones sat shotgun and found out he was out of smokes. The car ahead of us included Wayne Greenwell in the back of the big station wagon, looking backwards at us as we traveled. Good naturedly taking the brunt of our amusement from the trailing car, fully knowing he was talked about including faces made and gestures intended to humiliate, “Triangle” as he was known to us, smiled back and gave it right back. Anyway, Jones gestured to Triangle that he was out of smokes, upon which time, Wayne gestured to Tom to open his window and get ready to receive. At 80 MPH, Wayne flung a single cigarette with his best guesstimate of direction with the wind………….it rapidly floated exactly where Tommy could make the catch and it slid into his hand, undamaged. Our crowd burst into a massive cheer! The greatest cigarette transfer in the long history of tobacco!!

There was the ever present chance at “mooning”, of course, a custom taken advantage of at least once a year in my recollection. There was a reprise of the feet on the front, this time, as we mooned a fellow baseball car with someone’s bare butt out the window and the “pusher” would decide to hold them in place for a while, passing a few random cars in astonishment as we carried on.

There was the time Roy Kennedy got nauseous without saying so on a trip to Louisville – until it was too late and who quickly lowered his window and let it fly, virtually coating the side of the otherwise well-cared-for vehicle with a recipe for inciting more of the same and a stench which made us park far away from Jack’s car.

Bobby Hupp’s red full-size Pontiac Tempest convertible hid a terribly weak engine and served as our vehicle of choice later at Murray and PJC for nearly 2 years. It is impossible for me to forget the high school baseball days, however, pulling out of Littlewood Drive to the sound of “Monday, Monday”, by the Mamas and Papas on rich, warm Spring days and feeling the impossible beauty of life itself. Later, at Murray, Bobby and I became suitcase students, traveling back to Owensboro for strictly carnal reasons, among very few others.

He upgraded vehicles in our sophomore years at Murray, graduating to a true muscle car – a 429 powered GTO which occasionally got to over 140 MPH on our many trips to Owensboro and then maybe to Florida on a whim. I recall feeling motion sick at the passing view of telephone poles, going by at a rate I had never even imagined. I would often ask for Bob to slow down, simply because of the motion.

Needless to say, these crazy bonding and fun-filled days of absurd amounts of boyhood richness also coincided with some excellent production at the baseball end. The sophomore season of high school which I began with closed with a State Championship – Jack’s first. At a later date, interviewing Jack for a book about his life, I asked him which team he considered his favorite. I was absolutely shocked when he said, “Well, I guess it was your team – 1964 – because you won our first state championship,” (one of 4 for Jack). That, too, was a giddy sensation because of all the fabulous teams and talent on teams both before and after I played.

It sure is a good thing he is not around to read these “road tales”, probably the single time I would say this about a man I miss terribly to this day.One frown from Jack Hicks could ruin your week.