Is August too Early to Dream of Christmas Bicycles?

July 29, 1964

Jocie Brooke here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. Can you believe it's almost August? We go back to school in August. Groan. We used to wait until after Labor Day, but then it snowed quite a bit one winter and we were still going to school in June. The powers that be decided it would be better to go to school the hottest time of the year, the end of August, instead of the maybe not so bad first of June. June can be a sweet month without the kind of humidity that melts down even beauty queen Vanessa's curls. Vanessa has been known to call her mother and pretend she's sick to keep from being at school with her hair less than perfect.

Not that the boys care the least bit about one of her blonde hairs maybe being out of place. The boys, and I mean ALL, the boys at school run into the lockers after they land their eyes on her. I haven't figured out what's all that pretty about her, especially with wild curls springing out around her face and that frown on her face at any boy except the captain of the football team.

But I'm not reporting on Vanessa. You'd be bored silly. I'm hoping almost August isn't too early to dream about Christmas. Do you see that bike in the Sears catalog? Wow! I could go places if I had a bike like that. (I'm sure Vanessa already does.) But I could ride to Miss Sally's and go fishing maybe. I could ride to school. Groan. I wasn't ready to think about that again yet. I could almost maybe, well, not quite, keep up with Wes on his motorcycle. 

A new bike would be the neatest Christmas present. The very neatest! A bike of my own and not a hand-me-down rusty bike that's been buried under a ton of hay for years in some old farmer's hayloft. Maybe if I start talking now I can talk Dad into it by Christmas. It never hurts to ask, does it? Except Dad is always thinking about how we don't have a lot but we have what we need and some of the people in town don't have what they need, not even a rusty old bike, and how it's our Christian duty to share our blessings. I'm all for that. But I could use that bike. I might even be able to keep an eye on Mr. Whitlow if I had that bike! Well, I could have last week.

Oh, I didn't tell you, did I? He's disappeared. Well, I can't say for sure that he disappeared, but he's left town. Didn't check out. Bill Jackson says his room is paid up to the end of September. Says his clothes or at least some of them are still in his room. When somebody asked him how he knew that, Bill said it was his responsibility to check the room after the man didn't show up at the grill for breakfast two days in a row. The man might be sick or even, God forbid, dead. And wouldn't that cause a stink?! It didn't matter that his car was gone too. A person never knows and it's good to know. I think I like the way Bill thinks.


Zella doesn't know where he is. She doesn't want to talk about it either. She's worse than Cat before Wes feeds her. Snarling at the first word about anything. And she couldn't care less if that man was in town or out of town. Just ask her, if you dare, and she'll tell you. 

But oh, that bike. Did you ever have a brand new bike? Did it have a new bike smell? Or was there something else you wanted so bad that you started wishing for it in August?
 

Chiggers, Briars, Stink Bugs - the Price of Jam

Hollyhill, Kentucky
July 22, 1964

Jocie Brooke here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. Well, from Holly County anyway. We, Dad and Aunt Love and I, actually live outside the city limits. We don't live on a farm exactly, but there are farms all around us. Some of those farms have plenty of blackberry bushes on them and it's blackberry season. 
 
Do you like blackberries? I do. Lots, but I'm not all that crazy about picking them. But as Aunt Love is always telling me, an able bodied person who doesn't work shouldn't be wanting to eat. And I definitely want to eat. She says that's somewhere in the Bible too. So if Aunt Love hands me the picking bucket and tells me to go berry picking, I go berry picking. I do love blackberry jam on a hot biscuit with butter fresh churned by one of the women out at church. 
 
But even though I love that jam, picking berries is not all fun and games. Blackberries grown on briars. The best berries are always in the middle of the worst briars! Blackberries are bushy and there's no way to be absolutely certain a snake might not be lurking under those bushes. As if that's not bad enough, what about the spiders? There are always spiderwebs in the blackberries guarding the very best berries. Those big old spiders can have those berries. I'm not putting my hand anywhere close to them! And you have June bugs. I'm not afraid of June bugs, but their major whirring noise when you scare them away from a berry can give a girl a start. Sometimes there will be three or four June bugs on the same berry. It's like a helicopter starting up when they all take off together. 

But June bugs are better than stink bugs. When one of them gets on a berry, it's pretty much ruined for eating off the bush. Trouble is, you can't tell the stink bug has been there until you put the berry in your mouth. Big yuck! Then the only, the very only thing you can do after the stink bug taste is on your tongue is pop another blackberry into your mouth as quickly as possible. Of course, you have to hope the stink bug wasn't on that one too. Don't think I've ever eaten two stink bug flavored blackberries in a row and I hope I never do!! Talk about spoiling the anticipated yummy berry flavor. 

Saturday I got a gallon of berries. Took a long time. Zeb lay in the shade and whined off and on to remind me how hot it was. He was right! It was hot! Dogs don't like blackberry jam. I'm beginning to think twice about whether I do.

When I got the berries home, I had to wash them and get them ready for Aunt Love to make the jam. Then I had to hover nearby because well, Aunt Love is getting forgetful. She puts on a pot of blackberry jam - can't you almost smell it - and promptly forgets it. Last week she forgot to stir it and it boiled up and over the top of the pan down into the burners. What a mess! So Dad says I have to watch the blackberry jam pot boiling. That way I can either remind Aunt Love to check it or stir it myself. I hate stirring it myself. I always get burned. You see when the jam is boiling down and beginning to get thick, it pops in big ploppy circles like those pools out in Yellowstone. Those pops can land hot blackberry juice on your hand. Ouch! But that does mean it's almost done. Aunt Love tests to see if it's done by putting a dollop of the jam on a cold saucer and sticking it in the freezer compartment. Once it's had a minute or two to chill, Aunt Love looks at it to see if it's done. All I can tell is that it's purple. But Aunt Love can tip that saucer up and tell whether to keep cooking or stop cooking by how that jam sample sits on the plate. Or doesn't sit on the plate. At least she used to be able to do that. Now it's anybody's guess what she'll remember or what she'll forget. So far she hasn't forgotten the first Bible verse. I guess that's good if she didn't always hunt some out of her memory to try to keep me in line. And after I pretended to know about jam sliding on a plate and got popped by that jam juice while helping her. If she reads this, she'll give me a hard look and ask who plans on eating that jam.

I've got to go now and think about a way to stop these chiggers from itching. How about you? Did you ever get chiggers while blackberry picking?

  

The Hokey Pokey

July 15, 1964

Jocie Brooke here reporting from Main Street, Hollyhill, Kentucky. I'm back from 4-H Camp. What a blast! I hardly missed Hollyhill at all. Well, Dad and Wes some. Zella not at all. But she was looking pretty happy when I went to the newspaper office this morning. Guess she had a good week with me out of her hair. Cat came running to meet me. Of course, then he tried to scratch me when I reached down to pet him. He's been hanging around Zella too much. 

I danced at camp. That's pretty newsworthy. Leigh, that's Dad's sort of girlfriend, is always trying to get me to dance, but I have two left feet. She says that doesn't matter. That a person has the most fun dancing when they don't worry about anybody watching. 

Up to now, I just couldn't get into dancing. I'd rather ride my bike, but at camp, you had to dance. They had this big covered area and they played music every night. But it wasn't a couple thing, thank goodness. Everybody got in circles and then we did dances like the hokey pokey. Have you ever done the hokey pokey? It goes something like this. "You put your right hand in, you put your right hand out, you put your right hand in and you shake it all about. You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around and that's what it's all about."

And you know what? That was fun. Everybody holding their hands over their heads and doing little spins. Wes and Dad and I did the Hokey Pokey in the press room when I got home. That was okay, but not as much fun as at camp. There was this guy named Riley at camp. He kept bumping into me when he was doing the turn around. I think he might have been doing it on purpose, but it didn't bother me. He was sort of cute. Maybe guys my age aren't so awful bad after all! At least not all of them. There were some others that I wouldn't have minded if they'd floated their canoes down the river and lost their paddles.

Anyway, maybe dancing's not so bad. Do you like to dance? Ever do the Hokey Pokey?

Off to Camp

July 8, 1964

Jocie Brooke here, but not reporting from Main Street, Hollyhill. It's 4-H Camp week. No time for reporting anything. Been learning to canoe today. Only flipped into the water once and that boy, Jarrod, who was paddling with me, he did that on purpose. He thought it was hilarious. I laughed too. It wasn't so bad. I didn't mind getting wet since it was really hot today. And Jarrod, he's sort of cute. 

Don't tell Dad. He's worried enough already about me being here at camp all week without wondering if I'm thinking about boys. I'm not. Not really. But they do have these dances every night and a girl doesn't want to be a wallflower. Well, the pavilion doesn't have walls, but you know what I mean.

The leader is telling me I have to turn off my flashlight and go to sleep. So no more reporting tonight.

Did you ever go to 4-H camp? What did you like best about it? I love singing those silly songs about being a nut and then doing the hokey pokey. Fun!

A Night at the Hollyhill County Fair

July 1, 1964

Jocie Brooke here reporting from the Hollyhill County Fairgrounds. Once a year, the carnival comes to town and everybody goes to the fair. 

Dad says the fair is one of those good and bad happenings. Good because all the beauty contests and baby show pictures sell lots of papers. Bad because he has to be at the fair every night taking those pictures. The carnival is not my dad's favorite place to be. I tell him he can just drop me off at the gate with lots of film, but he says I'm not old enough to be totally unsupervised at the fair. He at least wants me to check in every hour or so. I guess he thinks I'll get stuck up on top of the ferris wheel or something.

Do you like to ride the ferris wheel? I think it is so neat to get stopped up on the tiptop of the wheel and get to see all around. Guess who I spotted while I was up there. Zella! I can't believe Zella was actually at the fair. Buying cotton candy! But there she was with a big cloud of pink spun sugar. I didn't see that Mr. Whitlow, but he must have been there. Chasing him would be the only reason I could imagine Zella coming to the fair. 

She usually makes a face when she even looks at the pictures we put in the paper of the fair. As far as I know, she has never even gone to the horse show even though that's quite the social event in Hollyhill. People rent boxes and sit right next to the ring where the horses show their paces. 

Once I gave the ribbon to the winner when I was younger. I had to dress up in church clothes and Aunt Love made me polish my shoes until they shone and for what? Stepped right into that dirt ring and the shine was gone. Now I just take the pictures of the other girls handing out the ribbons when Dad has to take a break for whatever reason. That suits me fine. 

Have you ever been to a county fair? What parts did you like best? Did you go fishing for one of those little plastic ducks and win a paper fan or a whistle? Maybe you tried to ring the bell with that big hammer. Or throw hoops over bottles to win a teddy bear. Or what about that game where people put money on different colored squares to bet on which color hole this mouse will run into once the carnival guy lets it out of its cage? Aunt Love says that's gambling and she better not hear that I was even watching that game. I wouldn't have done that anyway. I always save my extra quarters for candy apples. Those great caramel ones with nuts on them. Sticky but yummy! What's your favorite fair food?

Just wait until tomorrow when I ask Zella how she likes cotton candy. Wes wasn't there. He says Hollyhill on a regular day is plenty of carnival for him.

Raspberries in God's Pantry

June 24, 1964

Jocie Brooke here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. Do you love raspberries? The kind that grow out in the fields. Aunt Love says those are part of God's pantry. She also says that about asparagus and cabbage. That's a shelf in His pantry I don't care if I get anything off of. Yuck! 

People at church are always bringing us stuff from their gardens. I don't know why they all have to plant so much cabbage. And zucchini! Don't get me started on that. But I'm all for them planting strawberries and raspberries. 

But raspberries don't even have to be planted. You can just go out on the field and find them. You usually find chiggers too but a little scratching is a small price to pay for raspberries. 

Guess you can tell I love eating them. The best way is right off the bush unless a stink bug has been sitting on them. Then cabbage is better. But you just grab another berry to eat and the bad taste is gone. 

And Miss Sally fixed me  up this time with the chiggers too. She had me tie rags with coal oil on them around my ankles. Phew! No self respecting chiggers were going to jump on somebody reeking of coal oil. But the raspberries were worth it. Now if Aunt Love can get me to put any in my picking bucket instead of my mouth we might have pie. 

Have you ever picked wild raspberries?

Eighteen Mile Binoculars and Other Mysteries

June 17, 1964

Jocie Brooke reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. 

How about this neat ad I found in an old comic book? The very thing I need if I'm going to keep an eye on what's going on. The ad says you can see up to eighteen miles. I guess that's if no buildings or trees get in the way. But for sure I might be able to see across the street to the bank or the barber shop. Maybe even up to the hotel where that Mr. Whitlow is staying. The comic book is an old one that I found when Aunt Love made me clean out my closet. I doubt I could still order the binoculars, but I could send fifty cents and see. That wouldn't be much to lose. 

Of course, Aunt Love would tell me that fifty cents is fifty cents and a person shouldn't be ready to throw money away after naught but foolishness. But binoculars that can help you see eighteen miles? That would have to be useful for the newspaper business. 

I could see what everybody in Hollyhill was doing - including that Mr. Whitlow. Lately I might not need binoculars for that. The man keeps showing up here at the newspaper. So I came up with a way to snap a picture of him today when he came in. Zella was practically preening when I suggested a photo of the two of them together. 

Obviously, their Saturday night date was a big success. At least Zella showed up at the office Monday morning with a smile all the way across her face. She didn't even fuss about Cat, I mean Red Spot, leaving a dead mouse on the floor beside her desk. She just said good kitty and then hollered at Wes to come get rid of the mouse remains. 

Wes took his sweet time coming in from the press room. He wasn't all that busy. I'd just been out there with him and he was settled down reading what we wrote for news last week and drinking coffee. But Wes never gets in a hurry to do whatever Zella wants. That sometimes makes Zella want to pull our her hair or at least, uncurl some of those sausage curls. If they uncurl. I've never seen them so much as shift. When I was a little girl, I used to try to come up with reasons to touch Zella's hair to see if it was real or not. But even after I touched it, I wasn't sure. I'm still not sure. Every curl stays exactly the same all day long. Exactly.

Anyway, Mr. Whitlow came in the office before Wes made his way in to take care of the mouse. Suddenly Zella was almost fainting at the sight of the mouse where a minute before it wasn't causing her a minute's concern. Mr. Whitlow grabbed a paper off the counter and scooted the mouse up on it. Red snarled at him from his perch on the shelves behind Zella's desk, but Mr. Whitlow didn't seem to notice as he carried the mouse out to the trashcan on the street. He threw the paper away with it. I kept waiting for Zella to tell him he owed us twenty cents for the paper, but she just oohed and aahed and acted like the man had killed a tiger or something. I thought I was going to be sick and looked around for the nearest trashcan without a dead mouse in it. 

But a good investigative reporter takes advantage of the opportunities given her. So that's when I figured it would be a great time to get a picture of the man. A photo record might come in handy someday. While I was focusing in on them and Zella's smile was getting bigger every second, I sneaked in a few questions for Mr. Whitlow.

"What brings you to Hollyhill?" Not exactly subtle, but direct is sometimes the best way.

"It seemed so peaceful when I was driving through that I decide to stop and tarry a while," Mr. Whitlow said.

Tarry! Who says tarry? Nobody from around Hollyhill, for sure. 

"Where are you from?" I looked at him over the camera. "Just in case Dad decides to run your picture for whatever reason, we can put where you're from."

It sounded reasonable except Dad wouldn't put a picture of the man and Zella in the paper. Now if I'd thought quickly enough, I could have got him carrying out the mouse. On a slow week here in Hollyhill, that might have made the front page.

The man smiled. Showed way too many teeth. "I'm from here and there. Been all around. But this little town of Hollyhill, there's something extra nice about it. Got some really friendly people."

I pushed the shutter button and the flashbulb popped. After that, I stayed a minute to eavesdrop on them, but they weren't saying anything that sounded the least bit interesting. 

It dawned on me that the man might have a twofold purpose in sweet talking Zella. I don't know what the first reason would be, but the second one would be that instead of Zella finding out about him, he had probably found out about everybody in Hollyhill. 

So you see, if I just had those binoculars, I could watch the man and tell the sheriff if he started doing anything the least bit suspicious.

Well, binoculars or no binoculars, I'm watching him. But eighteen miles. That would be like seeing almost to Frankfort. Wes laughed when I showed him the ad. He said they'd have to be Jupiter space-age binoculars to work that good. So guess I'll save my fifty cents.