My Portfolio

On a murky afternoon in late December, 2001 I landed my son's Mooney in Mena, Arkansas after completing a demanding flight from Gladewater, Texas.  The weather had been bad throughout the two-hour trip.  The solid blanket of dark clouds was never more than 2,500 feet above the ground.  I had flown into...

     If I could talk I could tell you about so many holidays and other family get-togethers.   I have seen generations gather around me and then disappear to be replaced by a newer generation.   But I’m only a table.   A handsome table to be sure, and believe me...

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Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Northwest of my little home town a lonely hill stood guard over the murky waters of Cheyenne Creek, the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, and the swampy liquid of the Caney River as it moved lazily southward towards Bartlesville. A rutted, rocky, road that...

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Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Back in the days when there...

Around 1980 Waylon Jennings recorded a song about a  “Good Timin’ Man.” who “liked the bright lights and good timin’ friends” and a woman who “through teardrops and laughter” passed through this world “hand in hand” with him.   A little over a hundred year’s earlier a boy-child named Arthur Benton Carriker...

The stock from which my family evolved was mostly Southern and most of them had little or no formal schooling.  But imbedded in the gene pool they created were genes that came to the fore in a very pronounced way in my Dad's personality.  Two of those genes could accurately be...

My wife and I were sitting in our living room when our youngest son called and told us to turn on the TV.  We watched in stunned disbelief as fire and smoke billowed from the first-struck tower and then in complete incredulity as the second airplane hit the other tower.  We...

When “The War” ended in 1945 we had lived with shortages for four long years.  We were ripe and ready for new things.  Our factories had learned to mass-produce guns, planes, tanks, and trucks.   Now with the war over they were “all dressed up with no place to go.”   They needed...

I was much too young to be personally involved in this escapade but it is a story that was told and re-told many times around the table in later years at family get-togethers. Knowing my older brothers as I did I am convinced it is a true story. *******     ...

Had “Darwin Awards” existed in 1946, Gene Covell and I would have made the list.   It could easily have been awarded posthumously were it not for the fact that guardian angels look over little kids.  The stunt Gene and I dreamed-up seemed do-able at the time.  Sure, in the bright light...

The only grandparents I knew were my Grandma Beavers, who was to me a consummate witch, and my Grandpa Carriker, who was her polar opposite.   Grandpa Carriker came to visit us in the summer of 1942.   Compared to him, Calvin Coolidge was a blabber-mouth but Grandpa was a pleasant old man...

I seem to have always had a more stringent definition of what a "friend" is than most people.  I have had many great "acquaintances" in my life, some fairly meaningful, but I have truly had only two or three friends in my 78 years of living.  One of those - the...

My parents both enjoyed music. Dad was a self-taught, hillbilly, fiddler/singer who, as a teenager had played for many a square dance in Arkansas, took great joy in musically recreating the woes of the Indian girl “Red Wing,” the humorous ballad “Rye Whiskey,” and other old songs. Mother had been raised...

I attended a Memorial Service for my last remaining brother last Saturday. He was 84 years old, six years older than I.  Although we were brothers, we grew up in a vastly different world and had strikingly different memories of our childhood and adolescence. We in the family called him “Gene.” ...

Like its long-ago predecessor, the CB Radio, the Internet may drown in its own capability. A mosquito dies under a fatal slap and its demise will be reported, analyzed, and dissected in some niche on the Internet within minutes. Amateurs and professionals race to see who will be the first to...

Walk westerly a hundred steps or so from Winklers’ Drug Store in Caney Kansas around 1945 and you’d find yourself in front of one of the most consistently busy “stores” in town: Floyd Swayne’s Barber Shop.  This was a male kingdom.  If testosterone had color you could have seen it oozing...

A mile or so north of town Cheyenne Creek ran under a bridge on US Highway 75.  It was an old bridge with ornamental concrete balustrades fencing in the sides of the highway to keep cars from plunging into the water below.  On each end of the bridge there was a...

One of Mother’s many household duties during the summer when vegetables and fruits were ripe was to can as many fruits and vegetables as she could. The only canning process available brought with it a tour in the very fires of hell. Vegetables tend to ripen in the hottest part of...