woody park

Things have changed a lot since I was a kid.  A Coke and a Whistle Orange drink (if they even still make the stuff) cost more than a dime.  A pack of baseball cards doesn’t cost a nickel anymore.  A much smaller percentage of the population is walking around with a smoldering cylinder of paper filled with tobacco leaves in their mouths. 

And, I would like to believe that a lot of attitudes have changed.  Realities change, but people hold on to old habits and old attitudes.  They die hard, sometimes.  Sometimes, though, we just look up and they are gone.  One day we all saw Hugh Hefner wearing a Nehru jacket and we all wanted one.  Fortunately the trend died before I scraped together enough cash to buy one and the style died quickly and uneventfully.

I noticed the other day that a gun associated with a famous trial has gone up for auction and it appears that people have an interest in owning it.  While I would like to think that there are those out there who have an interest in it for historic reasons, I somehow don’t think this thing fits into the same category of Whig campaign buttons and memorabilia. 

One time I bought a fixer-upper in Lawrence, Kansas, that needed some serious rehabilitating and some rewiring.  My father was good at the former and expert at the latter, and he spent some time helping me get the electrical system safe for habitation.  One warm spring Sunday—very much like today—we were working on the house.  He came in from outside and asked me whether I knew that I had black people living in my neighborhood.  I said I did.  Then he asked me if I knew there were a hundred black people a half block down the street at a park called Woody Park.  I said I had seen them.  He asked me why I had bought a house in a neighborhood with black people.

I told him that it didn’t make any difference to me.

Dad had grown up in a time where attitudes were different and he had been born in the South.  He had a prejudice that I didn’t.  I went back to work and he went back outside. 

Later, I had a circuit completed and, although I had a good idea what I was doing—after all, he had taught me wiring—I started looking for him to check my work.  When I couldn’t find him anywhere I asked if anyone knew where he was.

“He’s down the street at the park with a bunch of black people,” I was told.

A half-hour or so later, he wandered back into the house. 

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“I recognized Woody,” he said.  Black guy I work with.  Helluva nice guy.  We drank a couple and shot the shit.  Nice bunch of folks.”

We didn’t say any more about it.  Dad just took his home-made tester—a couple of insulated 12 gauge wires from a piece of heavy gauge Romex stripped one inch on one end and connected to a Bakelite screw-in socket on the other with a 220 volt incandescent bulb in it— poked the bare ends into a duplex receptacle and checked my work.  The bulb lit at half-brightness, indicating 110 volts alternating current, so we were good.

There was no more mention of my choice of neighborhood.  It was okay from then on.  I don’t think he ever questioned the location of my house again.

And someday, there will be no one alive with any idea of what a Nehru jacket is or anyone who would have any interest in owning that gun.