John Henderson:  

Well.. it has been a long time since Waycross. But I will start there - at Senior High. I believe our class was the first to be known as sub-freshmen. That (as I remember it) was because the old Junior High was condemmed after we spent 7th grade there. Do you remember the smell of burned rats when they first fired up the furnace that winter? Ugh! Most of High school is a blur to me now. I remember the two old jalopies I had - first an old 36 Chevy coupe that the names of the old gang painted all over . Then a 38 Chevy sedan with a motorola radio and,,, most importantly, a back seat! That, of course was for double dating.. I stayed up front. Honest, Mom. Boy Scouts, camping on Billy's Island... and in the summer, on Blyth Island for two weeks. Our Scoutmaster, Jim Lott and his sainted wife put up with harmone crazed boys at their place on Saint Simonds over a weekend which turned out to be the entire week. I found some of the For Sale signs we stole when we closed up my parents house recently. Watermelons... Bates farm. Need I say more? I saw Gene Rigdon 40 years later and he said to me.. Let's go steal a watermelon. I hope the statute has run on that crime. There were a lot of pretty girls in our class .. and one or two behind us. No names here... I'm not that dumb. Well... maybe I am. But, girls let me tell you from the vantage point of almost 50 years now that you were the overriding subject of the boy conversation for the whole 5 years we were in Senior High. The movie "Grease" wasn't far from the truth. And Olivia Newton-John reminded me so much of..... Careful, John, no names here. My wife, God rest her soul, was jealous of Olivia. After High School, I went into the Army... for lack of a better plan. Three years..mostly in Frankfurt Germany at the 97th General Hospital as an MP. Guarding gates, shaking down German nationals who worked there for contraban cigarettes - which somehow never got turned in to higher authorities. Crawling around Bahnhoff strasse on days off. The King Bar where Willi the giant was the bouncer. I played football for the NACOM Black Knights. TDY was good duty. Barracks at WAC Circle. We were the pets of Lt. Gen Renaldo van Brunt. Happy days there and Gooood duty. We won'em all and won the championship and for that we all spent a week in Garmish on an all expense paid holiday! When I reported back to my unit on Christmas Eve, I was immediately sent to the main gate for the midnight shift. (The 1st Sgt didn't like it when I went on TDY). It snowed 24 inches that night! After the Army, I went to College! Nobody in my family had ever done that. South Georgia College and then Georgia Tech. More of the raging harmone syndrome.. but I had a few years maturity on most of those around me and I did study a lot and tried to hand in all the papers and finally squeeked by - picking up a wife and starting a family within 5 days of graduating....Expand for more