The Shrinking Man

With Hollywood talking about remaking the great 1950s movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man, I thought I would share the paperback cover with everyone. Knowing Hollywood, I hope they do it right. I would hate to see this old classic turned into a comedy.

Quicksand

Here I am standing on Burnett Street in Wichita Falls, about a block from the Wichita River. This was during the time I was playing on the river with Jerry Odom.

Our drive to the commissary at Sheppard AFB is always the same. Coming in from out of town, we take Seymour Road to Beverly, then turn towards the base and cross the Wichita River. I will glance at the ugly brown water running between the banks, and marvel at how uninviting and dangerous it looks today. We've even seen homeless people living under the bridge on occasion. But it wasn't like this in my youth.

There was a time when the muddy river beckoned to an eleven-year old boy and his companions. On weekends, my San Jacinto classmate, Jerry Odom would drag me from my house to explore the jungle growth of the mighty Wichita; to us it was a great waterway with pirates and beasts to be conquered. Jerry would bring his BB or pellet gun, and I would carry my homemade bow and arrows. Lizards were Komodo Dragons, and snakes became giant anacondas fifty-feet long. Or we might be outlaws of Sherwood Forest. Our imaginations knew no bounds.

Jerry always had plenty of BBs and pellets, and I made arrows from the branches of trees, so we never ran out of ammunition to battle our imaginary enemies. Once, Jerry let me shoot his pellet gun. I spotted an insect on a rock, took careful aim, and pressed the trigger. No, I didn't shoot my eye out, but the pellet hit the rock and bounced back - hard - striking me square in the forehead and knocking me flat of my back. It was my first lesson with firearms!

While exploring the margin of the river one day, we came upon a small tributary that branched from the main stream. It didn't appear to be more than a foot deep, so Jerry leaped over the gap easily. Anything that Jerry could do so could I, so I jumped right behind him. I landed in the water just inches from the bank. To our surprise, the mud below the surface wasn't solid and I began sinking rapidly. I had landed in quicksand! Suddenly, our imaginary adventure turned into a real threat. The mud was sucking me down fast, and it took all of Jerry's strength to pull me from the muck. He succeeded.

I got back to my house with Jerry's help. We only lived a block from the river, but the mud was caked on my clothes, and it was difficult to walk. At the door, my mother saw all that crud, and told me to wash it off with the hose outside, then come inside and change to some dry pants and shirt. When we did get inside finally, and I told my mother what had happened, she just smiled and told us to stay out of the mud in the future. She never did believe the story about the quicksand. Perhaps it was easier for mothers not to worry about their children, if they didn't have to think about dangerous quicksand and venomous snakes. As it was, I didn't learn to swim until I was fifteen, long after the days of playing on the bank of the Wichita River.

My mother had a pair of pet turtles she named Tom & Jerry because of our close friendship. We were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn playing on the mighty Mississippi River. We eventually moved away from the area, and I entered a new school, losing all contact with Jerry Odom. Time and separation often erases memories of childhood pals. Perhaps I would have forgotten Jerry long ago, if it hadn't been for that day he pulled me out of the quicksand. But every time we cross that muddy old brown river, I can still see us playing on the banks below, repelling hordes of pirates with only BB guns and homemade bow and arrows!

I may be older and wiser now, but deep in my subconscious is also a yearn for those simpler times, when youth knew no fear and two boys could find excitement and adventure in a make-believe world while our mothers laughed at our imagined dangers.

I hope Jerry also remembers. 

An adendom to this story, Jerry Odom passed away in 2012 after a long illness. I had tried to make contact with him, but he must have been under the care of a relative, so there was no phone number or address. I only discovered the town where he was living in the obituary. And even then, I was not able to get a response from his next of kin. A sad reminder that we should never lose touch with old friends.

Lash LaRue

When we moved from Ohio Street some time in 1950, my dad bought a small mobile home (8 X 28 foot), which he set up behind a lumberyard on Broad Street between 6^th and 7^th Streets. This was a new world for me. I was half a block from the Boys Club, and across the street from the Wichita Falls Memorial Auditorium. The mobile home was small, and didn't have a bathroom, but it was probably as big as the little apartment we lived in on Ohio Street for three years. There was a storage room in the big house, which had a bathroom for our use, a step above an outhouse. We had to take baths in a washtub.

            I joined the Boys Club and it became a home-away-from-home for me. It had a library and a workshop where I learned to make things on machines, a gym with lots of activities, and the employees saw to it that we had things to do every day. Across the street from the Boys Club was an orphanage with a fenced-in playground. I felt sad for the children inside, for they would stand at the fence and watch us playing outside, and were unable to join us. A block and a half from me was 8^th Street Park - those further up the road called it 9^th Street Park. It covered the whole block and had slides, swings, and merry-go-rounds; in later years, it was given the official name of Bellevue Park, the swings and slides removed, and million-dollar architecture was added. Ugly.

            The lumberyard had a wooden trailer parked in front with wood scraps and National Geographic magazines tossed inside, free for the neighborhood. It was some benefactor's way of seeing that the kids had something educational to read. The free scraps of lumber were a novelty also. Try going to a lumberyard today and asking for free scraps!

            My little world had suddenly changed from sidewalks and winos, theaters and 5 & dimes, to parks, playgrounds, and the Boys Club. I didn't miss Ohio Street, nor did I ever go back. I would visit Indiana Street once in a while, but for some reason I was afraid to venture back to where I had spent three years of my life.

            The Memorial Auditorium was open during the weekdays, and I had the run of the place, often helping out the office workers when they needed someone to run an errand. It wasn't all concrete and parking lot at the time, either. There were large grassy areas on both sides of the building, and these became the local children's playground in summer and winter. We would ride our bikes down the hill in the summer, and slide cardboard boxes down it in the winter. No one said anything to us. My sisters and their boyfriends also set pallets on the grass and made out when they could get rid of me. Usually that cost their boyfriends a dime or quarter. I would still run home and tell my mother that they were kissing their boyfriends!

            Something else about the Memorial Auditorium, they brought shows to town. I'm sure they charged for them, but I was always given a free pass. We only lived in the mobile home about a year, and when my dad couldn't make payments on it, we had to move. So the time would be around 1951 when one of my heroes came to town. I was given a pass for the show that night, and onstage was Lash LaRue and Al "Fuzzy" St. John, western stars I had watched at the picture shows downtown on many Saturdays. Lash would pop that 15-foot long bullwhip, and Fuzzy would roll a cigarette with one hand, then they would put on a mock fistfight for our entertainment. I sat in wonderment, as only an eleven-year-old boy could throughout the show. Then when it was all over, Lash and Fuzzy visited with the audience, and spoke with us. I even got a pat on the head from Lash LaRue!

            However, there is sadness even in such glorious times as this. Much later, I learned that in 1951 the B Westerns were dying, and all of the western stars were making the rounds trying to promote interest in a dying entertainment industry. Their contracts were up in 1951 and '52, and the studios were not renewing them. Westerns were growing up, and TV was taking the place of the Saturday Matinees. Cowboy stars like Lash LaRue were drifting away, their careers finished.

            About ten years after his last movie, the police found a man passed out in the gutter and threw him in the drunk tank to sleep it off. Someone at the station recognized him and notified the newspapers. The next day, the headlines read,  "Cowboy movie star, Lash LaRue arrested for public intoxication!" What could have been the final nail in his coffin actually revived his career to a small degree. TV networks heard about the arrest, and it wasn't long before Lash LaRue was making special appearances on network television. Conventions also started asking him to appear as Guest of Honor. Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson hired him in a bit part for their television remake of "Stagecoach". He died in obscurity at age 80 in 1996.

            They looked so much alike that Lash LaRue could have passed for Humphrey Bogart's twin. The likeness was often a curse for Lash, as people would often mistake him for Bogart. He enjoyed telling one story at conventions that went something like this: One day an actress he worked with asked him:

            "Are you related to Humphrey Bogart?"

            "I don't think so," he replied.

            "Humm," the actress continued. "Did your mother by chance meet Bogart before you were conceived?"

            When I met Lash LaRue in 1951, he was a giant. Perhaps his only claim to fame, besides his resemblance to Bogart, was that of a B Western movie star. But for kids growing up in the 1940s and '50s, our heroes were bigger than life. They were the good guys that we needed. The fathers we didn't have. They brought justice to the West, and gave us someone to emulate when we grew up. And that wasn't a bad thing.

Attack of The Flying Spiders

Attack of The Flying Spiders (SF/Horror)

By Charlie Meadows

ISBN #None

Atomic Publishing www.atomicpublishing.net

170 Pages

Price $5.99

Size: 3.5 x 5 Paperback

Rating 5 Stars

Wonderfully Fun!

Before reading this book, I let my mind wander back to the 1950s. It’s a Friday night in 1957, and I’m 17 years old. I pick up my high school sweetheart in my hotrod ’47 Ford coupe and head for the edge of town. The Drive-In is a dollar a car load, but it’s just the two of us. Finding an empty space, I park and turn the speaker on at the post, then put my arm around her as the movie begins to play on the big screen up front. As I turn my head to kiss her, my girl’s eyes get big as saucers, then she screams …

Inside a secret laboratory in the New Mexico desert in 1957, something very terrible has gone wrong. A scientist and his beautiful lab technician are suddenly menaced by an experiment out of control. Breeding a species of giant flying spiders for military use, the beasts have somehow escaped their cages. There is nothing that can stop them, and soon the monsters leave the facility and head for the nearby town, where they begin a campaign of terror; their fangs dripping venom as they spin a cocoon of black web around everything. The creatures were bred for warfare. The scientist was breeding them as weapons against an enemy, but their weapon was turning on their creators.

This short novel took me back to the 1950s, when I was a teenager, taking dates to the drive-in theaters, and watching those wonderful old B-sci-fi movies with giant spiders, insects, and reptiles. I could imagine this story playing out on the screen while I was trying to steal a kiss from my date. The author captures that period perfectly as he weaves a wonderfully scary tale to frighten your date. And like those old movies that entertained us for a few hours, this book was impossible to put down until the last page!

Tom Johnson, Editor

Fading Shadows