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Goodbye To An Old Friend

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  A week or so ago I went to a local bar and ordered a shot of whiskey. Once the bartender sat it in front of me, I thoughtfully stared into the glass, swirled the brown liquid, raised my glass to the sky, and toasted a lost friend.   Predictably, my thoughts drifted back to a few weeks ago when I finally got the phone call that I knew was coming. I had been expecting it - but it still came like a thunderbolt. Frazier, a good friend of 45 years, finally succumbed to Parkinson’s disease after a long year fight.   In the course of my life, I have had very few people who were business associates that became personal friends. Frazier was one of them. I first met him in a grocery store. Both of us were kids not long out of college. He was in charge of stocking the non-food items in a number of grocery stores in the Birmingham area. My job back then was insure that my company’s products were in every grocery store in Alabama, so naturally someone like Frazier could be of help to me. Almo
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The Name Game

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Hey, JoeHobby! How are you doing, JoeHobby? JoeHobby, can you come here for a minute? It’s a funny thing about my name. So many people use my first and last name together when talking to or about me. I don’t get “Joe”, or “Hobby” as much as I get “JoeHobby.” One of my creative fraternity brothers even switched the order and called me “HobbyJoe.”  Apparently, I have a  combination of two names that somehow sounds like one.   Believe it or not, I’ve given this a lot of thought. Maybe it’s the sing-song cadence of saying both names that makes so many people do it, including my own wife. During a recent trip to the doctor she was asked who her emergency contact was. When she responded, “JoeHobby.” The receptionist looked at her strangely and paused. Then she said,”Ohh, that’s his full name. At first, I thought you were saying one word.” She was.  What’s worse, the word “Hobby” can rhyme with most anything, so I’ve been called Slobby, Nobby, and Blobby. I just got a text from an old college
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Fins and Four Barrels

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  There are a lot of things guys forget: anniversaries, birthdays, doctor’s appointments, prepping for a colonoscopy, even picking up wives from the airport. However, no matter what old men may not remember, there is one thing they can recall with crystal clarity: their very first car.   My first automobile was a beat up 1960 Plymouth Belvedere - gifted to me by my grandfather. It was a quirky car, right down to the push button automatic transmission. Light blue with a white top, it  immediately became known among my friends as the Blue Marauder. This vehicle looked like the first cousin of Christine.  If you painted it black, Batman could’ve used it to drive around Gotham City.  That’s because like the Batmobile, the Belvedere had fins. Of course, lots of cars had them back then. Inspired by the space race and fighter jets, these automotive appendages began as nubs in the early fifties, and flourished into magnificent wings just a few years later. Cadillac was the undisputed fin
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Fry Me To The Moon

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  I was born in the south. And I live in the south. That means I eat fried food - me and about everybody else down here. Oh sure, I look on a restaurant menu and see where they offer grilled fish or chicken. They even charge more to grill it.  But most southerners like it fried. You can’t name a food we haven’t dipped in batter and dropped in grease.  The examples are almost endless: potatoes, chicken livers, ice cream, pickles, Oreos, Twinkies, donuts, and bread (aka hush puppies). We’ve even fried butter and gummy bears.  However, everyone knows that the king of fried food is, of course, chicken.  There’s even a National Fried Chicken Day. Maybe after that there should be a National High Cholesterol Day.  But who cares about HDL or LDL when you take your first bite?  Ah, that crunchy outer coating which gives way to perfect, tender chicken.  That’s why we love fried food so. Scientists have actually studied it, and discovered that it’s a process. First, there’s the crunch, then the m
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First Flight

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  The plane trip began in Tuscaloosa, and stopped in Jackson, before it finally reached Dallas. Later in life, taking this hopscotch flight was as aggravating as a floater in my eye. But not when I was 21 years old. Not when I was headed to my first big job interview - and my very first airplane ride. I was meeting with the St.Regis Paper Company. Apparently, they liked my first interview at the University of Alabama, so I was invited to fly out and meet some of the muckety-mucks. The operative word here is fly. Woo hoo!  I certainly was excited when I learned I would be flying to Dallas, although it was no big surprise - how else would I get there? I doubted they would put me on a Greyhound bus. And almost immediately, the college student in me saw another opportunity, one that was almost as important as finding employment.  Going to Texas would give me a chance to pick up some Coors beer.      Many of you will recall that for years, Coors, aka Colorado Kool-Aid, was only avail
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