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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (75248)	2/27/2000 12:31:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 108807

When I was a child (now listen carefully, Joan) when one called a number, the operator might reply, "The Lion is busy!" I always wondered what the lion had to do with connecting telephone calls, but I was so busy anticipating Keynes on macroeconomic theory, that I lacked the time to find out. My first cat was a yellow tiger -- named -- "Comrade Vann Woodward the Red Here's Food." -- of course I called him "Comrade." The name comes from a penniless instructor of history at Georgia Tech who used to come over and drink my father's bootleg whiskey and then fall asleep on our couch. Almost every weekend morning we had a hung-over novelist or social scientist to feed and encourage, after all, it was the depth of the great depression, 1933, no one at Georgia Tech was being paid in cash, and no one would cash the worthless script that the bankrupt state paid its employees. My father was a truly generous man. He shared his riches with poor people as only a poor person can. We had little furniture -- it had all been sold. We had bags of unsaleable grey floor (middlings) that were sent by bus from my Grandfather's farm. A side of bacon, sausage, we ate well. My great uncle Prater, lived in the basement, he had been gassed in world war I. He taught me how to scrape out a broken window when I was three, put in glass, set the points, and apply putty. My first trade as glazier. I've never forgotten the details. We were in arrears on rent for many months. Eventually we would have to move on campus where my father became in addition to his teaching superintendent of dormitories. It didn't pay anything in cash either, but it did provide a small apartment. We lived close to the Southern RR Mainline tracks, on Alden Avenue, close to Peachtree Station. Hoboes would drop off the train as it slowed going through Peachtree and walk down three doors and be given food and lodging and a bath from us. George Griffin lived in the first house down. These hoboes were mostly graduates of Georgia Tech, unemployed engineers, who had studied with my father or George in earlier years. The real C. Vann Woodward was working on his dissertation, I forget exactly where. People would ask him what does the "C" stand for. And he would reply "Comrade." He had talked Tom Watson's widow into giving him access to Tom's papers, and would eventually write his well-received book Tom Watson -- Agrarian Rebel and move on to much better jobs. "Where is Vann Woodward?" his old friends would say. "Gone to a better place!" his former colleaques would reply. One might wonder why a cat would be named "Comrade Vann Woodward the Red Here's Food." But when Vann and his friend were bumming around the Soviet Union they found themselves starving on a river boat on the Volga River. Broke, foreigners, suspected of being capitalist spies, they were sleeping and shivering on the deck (too poor to buy a seat for 5 kopeks inside). Apparently violating some obscure communist regulation, they were roused by the boson, a fine, strapping woman with just a cast of that well-known tartar eyeslant, and huge bulging unsprung breasts making ripples in her blue striped sailor shirt who stood before them and kicked them in the soles of their boots. Vann, on awakening, turned to his friend after eyeing the woman's ample mammaries and said: "Here's food!"