Black Death and Bad News

 

 

       They are coming, and believe me, nothing seems to slow them down.  They are non-native birds known as black vultures…an evil plague on the Ozarks. Black Vultures are compact birds with broad wings short tails and powerful wing beats, with white patches beneath the wings and coal black heads. They are carrion eaters but they also kill small mammals, including fawns, newborn calves, small pigs, baby sheep, cats and small dogs. They do that with powerful tearing beaks, eating the flesh before the creature they attack is dead. Their destruction has no bounds and along the White River in Arkansas, folks are being allowed to kill them without depredation permits. There are so many of them there now they are damaging docks along the river. In Texas seven hundred and fifty permits have been issued which allow the killing of black vultures any time, any place.

       I don’t speak of what goes on in the outdoors from just what I read or what I am told.  I have seen these birds, which have immigrated out of Mexico, and I have observed them and the things they do first-hand.  I first saw about a dozen of them at the Bennett Springs state park a year ago and urged park officials to have them killed.  They chose not too, and I doubt that anyone in the Conservation Department knows much about them. They won’t say much about them now, but they will in time, likely when it is too late to stem the tide. 

       I once saw 10 or 12 of those vultures attack a brand new red pickup in a Bull Shoals lake parking lot.  They were pecking at it, hood and cab top and clawing at it with their feet.   You tell me why; I have no idea.  When they left it, they had done nearly 5 thousand dollars worth of damage to it.  It was not an isolated thing.

 

      A week ago at Houston, Missouri I saw about 20 or perhaps 30 black vultures roosting and on the ground off a highway, just a half mile east of the hospital.  I have seen them in smaller flocks in several Ozark locations as far north as Truman Lake.

 In time there will be thousands of them in the Ozarks and I am urging farmers and ranchers to kill all of them you can, and keep quiet about it. Use a .22 rifle at a distance and keep quiet about it. For some reason, some of the worst of the overpopulated big birds are protected by law and badly overpopulated, birds like great blue herons, cormorants and pelicans and turkey vultures too.  

       Eagles are getting to a point of overpopulation.  What a laugh I get out of the MDC’s “Eagle Days” event, when city suburbanites are invited to different Department lands to observe eagles.  Observe Eagles? Lordy, they are everywhere.  Might as well have a squirrel day!

       On some of the interpretive nature hikes I guide each year we pass eagle nests with young eaglets looking over the side of their nest at us as we pass nearby, and their parents circling above us, screaming a warning.  A half-mile from my home there is a nest where eagles can be seen any time of the year, and in my explorations of lakes and rivers within 20 miles of my home as the crow flies I have found 19 active nests. I can photograph eagles any day of the week with little effort. There are tons of eagles now, as compared to my boyhood, when they were as rare as albino black bass.  

       I saw my first eagle floating the Big Piney with my dad when I was about 13. Didn’t see another one for years.  In Canada, they swoop down beside my boat after I throw out yellow perch or small walleye, and they get only a few feet away from my camera.  But eagles are as much a carrion eater as buzzards at times, and in this area they have become year-long residents because they feed in the winter on ducks and coots and fish and dead deer. You now begin to see them on country highways feeding on any kind of roadkill.  They   have absconded with ducks I have killed before my retriever could get to the dead duck and believe me if you have a small dog or a housecat, they are not safe if an eagle is close by.  If you want to see eagles close up in the wilds, join me on one of my March nature trips to Truman Lake.  We take up to twelve people at a time all day, and have a fish fry at noon.  Or you can join the MDC folks on “Eagle Days” and watch them through a telescope.  Right now the only thing easier to see than eagles, are squirrels, possums and armadillos.

         Why is it that the birds we want to increase will not, like quail and woodcock, and even the rapidly diminishing wild turkey.  Whippoorwills and Chuck-Wills Widows will be extinct in 20 years, and I think woodcock may follow.  Read more about that in my Spring Issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Magazine.  Because of the ease of feeding young passenger pigeons, they could have continued to exist in bird sanctuaries 100 years ago, instead of becoming extinct.  You know why we cannot do that with whippoorwills in the future?  I will tell all about it in that magazine article.

        

Email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

 

Winter and Wildlife

 

      During very cold and vicious winter weather, wild creatures need much more food than they need during the mild stretches that we love to see.

      The acorns that were as thick as I have seen them in a long time, become scarce in February and March, so we are coming upon the lean time of the year, the bottleneck that wildlife species must pass through before the arrival of spring, when there is replenishment and abundance once again. 

      If January and February are mild, and ice is scarce, wildlife survival is good, and reproduction in the spring is much better than normal.  If there is ice and snow and extreme cold, some wildlife species suffer more than others. That's why bird feeders are so valuable this time of year.  I can't keep mine filled.

      Those who feel compassion for wildlife in winter must be careful not to overdo it.  In our region, bobwhite quail suffer more than any other species, and it's always a temptation to feed them. Trouble is, feeding quail sometimes concentrates them in one place, where they become dependent on the handout. Then they are too easily found by predators, especially house cats, and can be wiped out because of that vulnerability.

      If you want to feed quail, don't create a regular feeding area, scatter the food where cover is heaviest, and don't feed them near a road.  Back in the late fifties, during periods of prolonged snow and ice the conservation departments gave rural mail carriers sacks of food to put out where they saw coveys of quail.  Birds are often drawn to rural roads because they can find grit and small gravel there which they need in their crops to grind up seed and grain.  Most of the mail carriers did their job so well, that in little time, the coveys were there waiting for the feed, and many coveys were wiped out by pot-shooters who couldn't resist the temptation. The program was ended when one mail carrier was caught with his shotgun, and a sackful of quail in his trunk.

      Wild turkey suffer if the ice is heavy, but they have strong legs, and can usually scratch through heavy snow to find food. When they are fed scattered grain in the winter, they are not as subject to predation, but they are just as vulnerable to poachers. We are now at a time when wild turkey populations are at critically low numbers and scattering corn where there are known flocks really helps them.

      Deer and rabbits are able to survive a hard winter better in our area because of the diversity of food sources for both. Deer can browse on plants above the snow, and rabbits eat bark when times are hard. Squirrels may not remember where all the acorns have been stored, but when there is a prolonged period of low temperatures, both fox and gray squirrels go into brief periods of hibernation in hollow trees and survive well because of that.

      The bobcat, fox and coyote may find weakened and dying wildlife in the winter, but this time of year is no easier on them than it is on the prey species, because they need more food when the cold is intense. And most of the year, the fox and coyote, and hawk and owl, feed mainly on small ground mammals, voles, mice and rats.

       

      When winter hits in full force, many small underground species will hibernate, and become unavailable. At such times, rabbits and quail are more intensely hunted, and the wild turkey is more vulnerable to bobcats and great horned owls, which are at the highest population levels I have ever seen. January and February sees a great loss in wild turkey through predation.  They are roosting on branches where they stand out like summer buzzards on a gravel bar.

      There are certain Ozark plants that help small game and birds to survive. Sumac and cedar hold berries above the snow for an emergency food supply, though neither are eagerly sought when other foods are available. Of course, in the Ozarks, the acorn is the most important overall food for all wildlife. Almost everything eats acorns, or depends on something that does. It seems that the best way to predict wildlife survival and spring reproductive success is to look at the availability of acorns in the fall and the period of time they can be found.

      But if you feel sorry for birds and small game in the winter, remember that cover is just as necessary as food. Leave thickets of sumac and cedar on your land, and create brush piles around them, and you'll help small game and wild birds even more than you would by creating a winter feeding trough.  I notice that in Arkansas, the Game and Fish Commission has declared war on the red cedar (Juniper) in the Ozarks. If you want wildlife to survive the winter, ignore that. Those folks do some stupid things.  In both Missouri and Arkansas I witness the occasional burning of cover and nesting habitat in the spring.  

      Remember that stands of cedar keep wildlife protected from brutal cold winds and snow, and those berries they produce aren’t the greatest food for birds and quail but they are survival nutrition during harsh, snowy winters.  I know… I see it on my place where cedar thickets in February are home to a covey of quail and several cottontails and a variety of wild birds.

      I need help distributing our publication entitled “The Truth About the Missouri Department of Conservation,”.  If you want to help, call me at 417-777-5227.

 

The Pool Hall Kid

 

       I went to work at the pool hall one afternoon, straight from school.  Ol' Jim and Ol' Bill were there and they could tell I was pretty despondent. I was 13 years old and had just got my first pair of glasses.  I wanted a girl friend awfully bad at that time and those glasses made me uglier than I had ever been.  One of the older girls called me ‘four eyes’.

  

       Now ‘the pool hall kid’ wasn’t my only nickname. Now I was gonna be called the “four-eyed pool hall kid”.  I told my old friends there on the front bench that I was thinking on quitting school and just staying there in the pool hall forever.  Ol’ Bill asked what brought that on and I told him.  I was born too ugly to ever get a girl friend and now I was uglier because of those glasses.

       Ol’ Jim tried to comfort me.  “Onc’t when I was a kid,” he said, “me an’ some a my cousins all found a mirror on a wall in the barn an' we stood in front of it makin’ scary faces to see who could be the ugliest an’ they all said that no matter what I did I couldn’t look no uglier then what I already was.”

         He used his foot to pull the spittoon over a little closer to his range, and then went on.  “But by the time I was 20 years old,” he smiled,” girls was crazy about me.”

       

       “I learnt the way to get a girlfriend,” Virgil Halstead chipped in from his end of the bench. When I was a kid, I cut up some catalog pages to the exact size of a dollar bill and rolled it all up with a dollar bill around it and let Lucy Johnson see it and she spoke to me for the first time in years.  And when I put a five dollar bill around that roll of catalog papers… by dang, she wanted to marry me!!”

       At that everyone on the front bench laughed and slapped their knees and nodded their heads as if they knew what he was talking about.

       But it was pretty clear to me that if I stayed ugly much longer then my only option for a girl-friend was a girl as ugly as me, and I didn’t know any! As to the girls in my school there were just various grades of pretty, and my chances with any of them was comparable to the chance of me killing three ducks with three shots.

       It is rather amazing as I look back on my years working in my dad’s pool hall that I was around a number of World War I veterans, including my Grandpa Dablemont.  Few of them talked about being overseas as young men, fighting the Kaiser. Most of the time, life on the front bench was a joyous collection of hilarious hunting and fishing stories.  I think some of them were true.  They were the best outdoorsmen I have ever known and I treasure the memories they gave me.

       It was hard for me to understand, as a kid, the problems old men faced.   Ol’ Bill said that he had got to a point where he had to get up twice during the night to pee. He, like most of them, had no inside plumbing.  He said that one night when he went out to answer the call of nature he was watering the flowers just off the front porch when it began to rain. Ol’ Bill said he heard the water running off the roof and stood there for nearly ten minutes thinking he wasn’t done yet.

       But Ol’ Jess Wolf had come up with something that made life easier for most of the front bench regulars. He had drilled a hole in the bottom of the wall in his old house, stuck a length of water hose through it from the outside and attached a funnel to the end inside his bedroom, right next to his bed.

       Jess didn’t have to go out on the porch in the cold anymore. He just sat up on the edge of his bed and reached for that funnel. Many years later when I was in college one of the professors there at M.U. told me that I’d never learn much from those backwards old men I had grown up around in the Ozarks, because I was so much like them. I  thanked him for that.

  

       Now, as I look back on my boyhood, I cannot remember a thing that intellectual professor ever said, but I can remember all the advice those old men in the pool hall gave me.

       I wrote a book about those old men I grew up with in the pool hall.  The name of it is… “The Front Bench Regulars… Wit and Wisdom from Back Home in the Hills.”  It is one of my best sellers out of my ten books about the Ozarks. Four or five times a year I publish a great 120-page magazine about the outdoors and the Ozarks together. You can see all of these books and nearly 100 of the magazines on the computer at www.larrydablemont.com.  To get one of any of them, or some of all of them, just call me.

       The publication entitled, “The Truth About the Missouri Department of Conservation” is back and is being mailed.  It is a free publication, all we ask is that you pay the $3 postage!  To get a copy, call 417-777-5227. You can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.

 

The Museum and A Church

 

         When I was young, nothing about school interested me.  But now I am a naturalist writer who loves the outdoors and I can’t get enough of Ozark history.  I have dreamed of a Big Piney museum for a long time.  It is soon to become a reality, because we have acquired an acre of land south of town beneath some big oaks and a giant pine tree where we can build it.  iwill be there this coming Saturday and if you would like to see it, and where the museum will set, then contact me.

         We are getting ready to pour a foundation.  Such a museum is to be a combination of the outdoors and history both, and a place where the old timers can come and tell visitors about what they saw and experienced.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a lady who knew how to operate an old time spinning wheel, or several ladies  who could make a quilt while folks watched.  I envision having two or three old-time musicians playing banjos or mandolins there from time to time, or perhaps a harmonica.

           

        The location is better than I envisioned, with the possibility of nature trails close-by, and a big rock fireplace where you could have checker tables and fresh coffee.  Nearby will be a pool table that came to Houston brand-new in the early ‘20’s, made by the A. E. Schmidt company in St. Louis.  They named it a Victory Table, for the freshly ended World War 1.  It is one of the best I  have ever seen to play on.

         Just outside the museum we will display two historic john-boats, one a wooden john-boat like the first ones to run the river , and another made from aluminum, created in 1952; 20 feet long with a serial number of 0001. It was the very first aluminum river-boat, and was made for the Piney River.

         I haven’t said much about it before but in 1960  a 13-year old kid found an ivory-pendant artifact in a Big Piney River cave with a second piece of broken, carved ivory. Still today it is said to be the only ivory artifact found in Missouri, obviously carved from a mastodon tusk, radio-carbon tested, and found to be 8,000 years old.  I will bring it too the Brown Hill Church Sunday with some other artifacts, so others can see it.  Much of what that kid found in those dozens of caves will be a big part of the museum. I’ll let you guess who he was, one of the local high school’s worst students! 

         But there will be lots more than what I have mentioned.  I know it cannot be finished as quickly as I would like, but by the beginning of next year, I believe it will be close to completion.

         There will be something about the Big Piney museum unlike most… IT WILL BE FREE FOR ALL VISITORS!  But it will be a place where local people can sell what they make; quilts, paintings, books, wood-carvings, etc.

 

         Next Sunday, January15, we will have another service at the Brown Hill Baptist church  which is about 4 miles east of Houston on the  Brushy Creek Road.  Join us from 11 to noon if you have no other church to attend. A lady who lives near the church is trying to get the community involved, and I am trying to help her. Her name and email is Ouida Malmsko, of native American ancestry, and she would like to hear from anyone who wants to attend next Sunday or help in this project.  Her email is ouidamalmsko.@gmail.com.  I will be there Sunday and we are looking for ministers who have an interest in the church.

         I would love to get that little country church going again since it was the first church I attended as a small boy. It is remarkably much like it was then, and I believe it likely started more than 100 years ago as a small one-room schoolhouse. 

         If you haven’t been going to church somewhere else, contact Ouida and let her know of your interest. That Brown Hill church has been closed for two years.  It has a history, and there are families in that area which can make it an important House of God once again.  You do not have to dress up to come Sunday.  Just come as you are.  You might wash behind your ears.  When I was young, my grandma always made me do that on Sunday morning. What memories I had there from my childhood.  Join us at 11 a.m. if you do not have a church to attend. And  let Ouida know you are coming.

         The publication entitled, “The Truth About the Missouri Department of Conservation” is back and ready to mail. It is a free publication, all you have to pay is the postage!  To get a copy, call 417-777-5227. You can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.

 

A CHURCH AND A MUSEUM

         Next Sunday, January 8, we will have another service at the Brown Hill Baptist church  which is about 4 miles east of Houston on the  Brushy Creek Road.  Join us from 11 to noon if you have no other church to attend.

         I would love to get that little country church going again since it was the first church I attended as a small boy. It is remarkably much like it was then, and I believe it likely started more than 100 years ago as a small one-room schoolhouse. 

         I am trying to get a minister to join us and deliver a sermon and trying to find a piano player.  The church recently acquired a new piano and there is also an organ there.  

          I don’t want to have people attend our service who have a church to go to, because all around the county are big, fairly new churches, even well out into the country.

  

         But if you haven’t been going to church somewhere else, come and join us.  That Brown Hill church does not need to be closed.  It has a history, and there are families in that area which can make it an important house of God once again.  You do not have to dress up.  I won’t.           Just come as you are.  You might wash behind your ears.  When I was young, my grandma always made me do that on Sunday morning. What memories I had from my childhood when I was a boy..  I will tell you  about some of them Sunday.  Come and join us at 11 a.m. if you do not have a church to attend. I know God will be there, and I’ll bet He will be smiling.  I think God has often laughed heartily at things I have tried to do!

 

         When I was young, nothing about school interested me.  But now I am a naturalist writer who loves the outdoors and I  can’t get enough of Ozark history.  I have dreamed of a Big Piney museum for a long time.  It is soon to become a reality, because we have acquired an acre of land south of town beneath some big oaks and a giant pine tree where we can build it.

  

         Now we are getting ready to pour a foundation.  Such a museum is to be a combination of the outdoors and history both. and a place where the old timers can come and tell visitors about what they saw and    experienced.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a lady who knew how to operate an old time spinning wheel, or several ladies  who could make a quilt while folks watched.  I envision having two or three old-time musicians playing banjos or mandolins there from time to time.

           The location is better than I envisioned, with the possibility of nature trails close-by, and a big rock fireplace where you could have checker tables and fresh coffee.  Nearby will be a pool table that came to Houston brand-new in the early ‘20’s, made by the A. E. Schmidt company in St. Louis.  The named it a Victory Table, for the freshly ended World War 1.  

 

        Just  outside the museum we will display two historic john-boats, one a wooden john-boat like the first ones to run the river , and another made from aluminum, created in 1952; 20 feet long with a serial number of 0001. It was the very first aluminum river-boat made for the Piney River.

 

       I haven’t said much about it before but in 1960  a 13-year old kid found an ivory-pendant artifact in a Big Piney River cave with a second piece of broken, carved ivory. Still today it is said to be the only ivory artifact found in Missouri, obviously carved from a mastodon tusk, radio carbon tested, and 8,000 years old.  I will bring it too the Brown Hill Church Sunday with some other artifacts, so others can see it.

           

        Much of what that kid found in those dozens of caves will be a big part of the museum. I’ll let you guess who he was, one of the local high schools worst students!

 

         But there will be lots more than what I have mentioned.  I know it cannot be finished as quickly as I would like, but by the beginning   of the next year, I believe it will be close to completion.

         There will be something about the Big Piney museum unlike most… IT WILL BE FREE FOR ALL VISITORS!  But it will be a place where local people can sell what they make; quilts, paintings, books, wood-carvings, etc.

 

         The publication entitled, “The Truth About the Missouri Department of Conservation” is at  the printers and should be ready to mail in less than 2 weeks.  It is a free publication, all you have to pay is the postage!  To get a copy, call 417-777-5227.  

Just Another Passing of Night

 

    There won't be any New Year’s Eve party here on Lightnin' Ridge. Things will be about like they are almost every night during the winter. Before midnight, a pair of raccoons will be ambling along the small creek that leads down to the river, looking for food that is becoming harder to find because the crawdads are in deep water and the frogs are buried in the mud, just as it has been for hundreds and hundreds of years.  

 
  A great horned owl will leave his perch at the edge of the meadow and sweep down upon an unsuspecting deer mouse without a sound other than the rustling in the grass when he pins it against the cold earth with sharp talons.  A great horned owl’s wings still make no noise, just as it has been for who knows how long.  Unfortunately for the mouse, he won’t live to see the new year, but he doesn’t even know that there is one coming.  He didn’t see the coming of the last one.  He has lived only 10 months, and that’s a long time for a mouse.  The field where he has lived is a home for dozens of field mice, voles, cotton rats, and shrews; nearly a dozen species of small ground mammals, some of which spend the entire winter beneath ground in hibernation.  Fortunately for the owl, and other predators, there are some species of small mammals that do not hibernate, but remain active throughout the winter or at least much of it.

       Inside the big oak where the owl sat, a pair of fox squirrels sleep in a small, protected cavity.  They will miss the dawning of a new day and a new year if the temperature is well below freezing for a good while. Squirrels do not hibernate throughout the winter, but in periods of extended extreme cold, they will sleep for days, in a semi-hibernation much like the raccoon, the skunk and the opossum.

There are some big sycamores along the bluff over the creek, and several wild gobblers spend the eve of the new year asleep on their branches, their forms plainly visible in the moonlight.  Three are big old toms, but there are five jakes which have never experienced a new year’s eve before.  They sleep through it, with tightened tendons in their legs securing their toes to the limbs of the sycamore like the grasp of a vice.  Their ancestors weathered the passing of hundreds of new years in the same way. Change is not clamored for amongst wild creatures.  It is a resistance to change that ensures survival of the species.  It is sameness that gives security in wild places.

     In a cedar thicket, buried in the grasses, a covey of bobwhites form a ring, ten of them in all.  There were nearly twice as many in November.   The new year brings little for them to celebrate.  With their bodies huddled together, warmth is passed to the weaker members of the covey by the stronger and they preserve heat as feathers fluff and insulate. When there are too few and the temperature plunges, there is less chance of survival.  As the new year begins, smaller groups find birds of another covey and join them, in greater numbers finding greater strength to resist the cold.  

    Huddled beneath the cedar, they are unaware of the red fox, which passes as the new year approaches.  His is an eternal quest for food, and if he only knew they were there, what a New Year’s Eve party he would have.   But like the owl, he will settle for a few small ground mammals on this final night of an old year.

    A half dozen mallards spring to flight as a bobcat streaks across the river gravel bar where they rest, upstream from the mouth of the creek.  He leaps high to grasp a slower member of the flock with his forepaws and pulls her down, taking that weaker, slower individual for a new year’s feast.  The hen mallard is a substantial meal for the bobcat.  The rest of the flock circles in the moonlight and will settle into another hole of water upstream.  

    The dying protests of the quacking hen breaks the stillness, but other sounds of nature at midnight are subtle.  A buck snorts from a cedar thicket above the creek.   A dying rabbit shrieks from the field across the river, as a mink ferrets him from a brush pile.  Smaller than the rabbit, the mink can go anywhere, and he wraps his body around the cottontail’s neck and hangs on, his teeth buried in the soft fur as the life and death struggle which marks the beginning of a new year is just as it has always been.

     Here where the creek joins the river, where the woodland breaks into meadow, there are thickets of briar and cedar, standing as they have since men first came to change and scar the land....life goes on.   There is no celebration here.  It is only the passing of another night, the coming of another day.

    And I know that for some it is necessary on this night to group together and make much of the ticking of a clock, where alcohol flows and the noise grows to a blaring crescendo.   But I’ll walk that quiet wooded ridge above the creek at midnight, and treasure the silence, listening for little more than the distant yodel of a coyote.  I’ll survey the river bottoms in the moonlight and be thankful for the stability of unchanging nature...wild creatures living as they always have, evidence of God’s unchanging laws which even man will eventually answer to.

    There is perfection here...thank God we haven’t ruined it all.  We will in time, I suppose.  These mushrooming numbers of human beings will destroy it all eventually.  But maybe not this year…  On this little Ozark ridge-top, there is life continuing as it always has. 

This quiet wooded ridge overlooking the moonlit river, is a good place to ask the Creator to allow us all to enjoy one more year, to ask that the coming year be a good one.... a year wherein wild things and wild places continue to exist. 

 

 

Grandkids and Christmas

 

My grandparents, mom & dad, aunts and uncles and all us cousins.  I'm on the right, first row.

       As much as I loved my two little grandsons, I didn't get either of them a Christmas present when they were young.  That's because they had toys stacked so high in their home that you couldn't see any corners.

 

       I think back on those great Christmases when I was a kid, when there was common sense and simplicity left in this world. I wish all kids could experience such a Christmas.

 

       I just lived for a new two-gun and holster set and a cowboy hat at Christmas when I was five or six. Nowadays, if a little kid has a toy gun, somebody is scared to death he'll point it at someone and go "bang-bang", like I and a thousand other kids born during the days of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers did. 

       Here we are at a time when no kid can have a toy gun and look what's happening. Maybe somebody is overlooking something. It might not be toy guns that created the monsters. My cousins and I built forts and took our toy guns out and played cowboys and outlaws all the time and none of us ever held up a convenience store or a bank when we grew up.  We never shot anyone either!

       By the time we were 11 or 12, we all carried Barlow pocketknives to school and back home each day, and yes, we all cut our fingers a time or two. But nothing that left a scar. If Grandpa gave us a Christmas present, it was maybe a hickory whistle he made, or comic books that had the top of the cover cut off. 

       When I was that age, I was tickled to get two or three Christmas presents under the tree, and there was always a gun and holster set, to be used hard in my effort to catch bad guys and herd cattle, like they did on the Saturday afternoon movies at the Melba theater in town. A youngster could get in there each Saturday afternoon for a dime. 

       There wasn't much quantity to life for a kid in the Ozarks in the 1950's, but brother, did we have some quality.  When I see some kid looking at a little box where they use their thumbs for hours and hours, I think to myself that life isn’t better for kids who do that.  But they can never know what they are missing.  What a difference there seems to be today, in grown ups that used those boxes as kids and those of us who built forts in the woods and chased make-believe outlaws with toy guns.

       On Christmas day at Grandpa's house in the 50’s, all of us cousins got together and had one heck of a time without toys because our folks wouldn't let us bring anything.  They had paid too much money for those guns and holster sets and cowboy hats to let one of those rowdy cousins get their hands on them. We didn't need toys anyway when we got together on Christmas, we'd play football or go down to the pasture and throw dried persimmons at each other.

 

       Finally we'd have the doggonedest dinner you ever saw, and my Dad and Uncles and Grandpa would talk about somebody's pick-up motor or the best coon dog they remembered or something of that sort.

 

       Finally when Aunt Margie and Aunt Ruth and Aunt Mildred and Mom and Grandma got the kitchen cleaned and in order, we'd all come in and get our presents from beneath the cedar tree beside the wood stove.

 

Grandma remembered each of 20 grandkids with a gift, which almost always was a pair of socks for the 14 boys, handkerchiefs for the girls.

  

       Then we'd watch our aunts and uncles open their presents, usually a flannel shirt for the men and scarves and perfume for the women.

       Then Grandma and Grandpa would open their presents and they'd get all sorts of good things. Lord knows there was so much they needed.  I remember thinking that the people who did the best at Christmas were grandparents, because their kids all had jobs and could buy good presents for them. And most had lots of kids.

 

    My two grandsons will never remember that when they were little Grandpa never got them anything for Christmas. On Christmas morning when they picked out some toy or gadget they really, really liked, I just waited 'til they were all by themselves and told them that Grandpa asked Santa Claus to bring that to them!  Some of the grandparents who read this column might remember how affective that is.

 

       But if the truth were known, I'll bet both of my grandsons would have just loved to get a gun and holster and a homemade hickory whistle for Christmas.  Maybe not, since quality is not as important now as quantity is. 

       To so many, the reason for it all; the birth, the hope and the faith resulting from that miracle two thousand years ago, just isn’t there any more.  There is beauty now; bright, colored lights everywhere, all of them resulting from one bright star in the Far East long ago.  It was just one light then, a star heralding the greatest hope mankind will ever have. 

       We were told about that when we were kids, with those silly little church plays and school plays, school plays that can’t be part of Christmas anymore because of our new progressive ‘culture’. It’s funny what some call ‘progress’ nowadays.

       As kids, us old timers were told about the star and the manger and the virgin mother of Jesus, and gifts brought by the three wise men… the origin of modern day gift giving.

        If you are a grandparent taking my advice, give your grandkids a pair of socks and tell them about how Christmas came to be.