Mother and son.
Chloe and Dusty
Chloe sometimes comes with us when we take the dogs for their last longish walk of the evening. Her coloring is just about perfect camouflage for the pine bark behind her. Her son Dusty never walks with us. He looks a lot like one of the rocks we use in the landscaping. Lying around like a rock is what he does mostly, when he’s not eating or running away from something.
Way back in the distant past, when I was a different person, I worked as a newspaper reporter in Augusta, Ga. I started in the spring of 1973 and worked there for three years on the State Desk. That meant that I covered the surrounding communities, up to around 50 miles away from town. City council meetings, county commission meetings, school board meetings, and anything else I could think of. I got to do some really fun and interesting things, like ride in the cab of a steam locomotive and sit in the pilot’s seat of the Goodyear blimp while it was in the air. I also did a lot of feature writing. Most of that is lost beyond recovery in my memory. But when I was cleaning out some old stuff at my mother’s house, I ran across some letters from readers.
Here’s a nice one, from March 1972:
Dear Mr. Parris (sic),
Thank you for the nice write up in the paper.
We had a lot of visitors and I think we made some new friends. Everyone talked about how nice the article was. One even wanted us to put our names on one for her. The first time anyone ever wanted an autograph from us. Some said they had never seen anything like this setup for the martins. All had tried to attract martins to their places but only a few had ever had any to nest with them and thought we might could help tell them if there was anything else they could do. We gave away quite a few gourds. Maybe that will help.
Have a good day and thank you very much for all the nice things you said about us and our place for the birds.
Mr and Mrs. ***
P.S. The best yet for my scrap book.
And now you know as much about the article I wrote as I do. I assume I wrote about purple martin nests they made from gourds. It seems to spark some weak memory, but I’m not sure whether I’m just making it up now, 41 years later. I have a fairly large box full of old clippings. Maybe I can find the story.
I regret to say I don’t think I ever wrote a note back to them. They seem like nice people. I imagine that they are dead now. A quick check online found a lot of people with their last name in the community where they lived, but no one with the full name.
And then there was this letter from September 1975:
Dear Mr. Paris,
While reading your article in the Augusta Chronicle on demand growing for wood stoves, I became very infuriated by some of your remarks you made about the “poor country people.” Let me say that I live in the country, and I feel that I’m one of the richest persons in the world. We may not have a bank full of money, but God has certainly blessed us in so many other ways.
You may not believe this, but even though we live in the country, we have central heat and air conditioning in our home. Let me say that if the need arises for us to get a wood stove I believe we could afford to buy one, and I feel sure we could get the wood to burn in it. I don’t think “poor country people” have to burn boxes and other household trash any more so than city people. I guess you have realized by now that I think you need to get out and busy yourself to find something more interesting to write about next time.
If you can’t say something nice about country people, just don’t write about us at all.
Thank you,
Mrs. ***
I remember absolutely nothing at all about the article, but I do remember feeling injured, because, as I recall, I thought I was not implying that all country people were poor, but that some poor people who happened to live in the country were using wood stoves. I am pretty sure I was quoting a wood stove salesman about what some poor country people might burn in their stoves. I also regret that I never wrote the author back to try to apologize and explain.
I remember getting another letter from an engineer who took issue with my spelling of the word mill in reference to property tax. I think I spelled it “mil” which he said was a unit of measurement. He was irate. I have to say in my defense that the copy editor should have caught that, but the ultimate responsibility is mine. I still wonder why it offended this guy so much. I did not keep his letter.
I have one more letter on the positive side.
Hi Mark,
Just a note to let you know we were thrilled to see (their daughter’s) picture on the front page of the Augusta Chronicle. It was such a surprise!
I think it was so nice of you to take such an interest in someone you didn’t know.
If we can ever do a favor for you, let me know.
Thanks again,
From all the writing I did, as far as I can tell, four people were moved to actually write me. These letters make me think. I guess most of the writers are dead now, or maybe in nursing homes, or invalids in their own homes. I touched their lives in some way, large or small, and at the time I didn’t understand what that meant. Based solely on me, I have to conclude that twenty-somethings can be pretty dense.
It has taken me a long time to realize that what you do in what seems the simplest way can have such a big effect on people. If I had understood more, maybe I would have done things differently.
It’s a lesson I continue to have to learn.
I emailed Leah’s brother to ask him about their father’s service in World War II. This is what he sent:
My father and his brother Billy served together in the 1st Army in the ordnance division. They drove trucks from Normandy all the way to Belgium hauling ammunition, guns, etc. He and his brother arrived in Normandy on either D-Day 1 or 2. He told me about seeing all the damaged/destroyed equipment as well as seeing one vehicle in which a dead, burned American still remained. They were billeted in the home of a Belgian family at the end of the war. They were told they would be going to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan and they weren’t keen on hearing that news. He was placed on guard duty one snowy night during the Battle of the Bulge and was very afraid because they had been told of the Germans who were dressing as Americans. He managed to acquire a .45 cal pistol and carried it that night in addition to the .30 cal carbine he had been issued.
That’s about all I know. Wish I had asked a lot more about his experiences.
Leah and Dan’s Uncle Billy still lives in Rome. He’s 91, and is a lot slower than he used to be. He lives alone and continues to drive.
Today is a good day for us to remember our fathers. Both Leah’s father and my father served in the Army in Europe during World War II. As you might expect, as a boy, I was more interested in the details of my father’s military service than Leah (who is a girl) was in hers, so I can remember more than she can.
Here is the only picture we have of Daniel D. Primm Sr taken in Europe during the war. It was during a visit by Eisenhower. Leah’s father is second to Eisenhower’s right, with the dark coat.
Dan Primm Sr with Gen. Eisenhower
This is my father, Grady V. Paris, taken somewhere in Europe. He didn’t wear a mustache after the war.
Lt. Grady Paris, Europe, WW II
He was wearing his crossed musket infantry insignia on his left collar. The division patch on his left arm is not really visible. He was in the 104th Infantry, the Timberwolf Division. This is the Timberwolf patch.
Timberwolf Division patch
He was also wearing his Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB).
Combat Infantryman Badge
The only way you get this is by being in the infantry and serving in actual combat.
When my father was drafted, he went into the artillery. He wore the crossed cannons insignia.
Crossed Cannons
Later, during training, he was transferred to the infantry. He was in an infantry cannon company, but, even though he was still involved with artillery, he had to wear the crossed musket infantry insignia.
Crossed Muskets
Here is a picture of my father during training. You can see the Timberwolf patch. When this picture was taken he was still wearing the crossed cannons. I think this was probably taken in Arizona, where he spent some time in training.
My father during training
I’m pretty sure the cannons his infantry cannon company used were 105-mm howitzers.
105-mm howitzer being fired
He kept the crossed cannon insignia for as long as he could, until finally an officer told him to put on the infantry insignia. If he had served in the artillery, he wouldn’t have had the CIB.
Later, after the war, Leah’s father left the Army, but my father stayed in the reserves. This time he was actually in the artillery. He ended up as the battalion commander for the artillery unit stationed in Rome. As the technology changed, the artillery began using rockets, and their insignia changed to crossed cannons with a missile superimposed.
Crossed Cannons and Missile
When I Google this, I find it referred to as the air defense artillery insignia, but this was not what it was when my father was in the reserves. Their battalion was trained with 8-inch howitzers and Honest John missiles. Neither of those is used for air defense.
This is an image of an Honest John I found on the Web.
Honest John
Here is an image of the 8-inch howitzer.This is a display that was apparently held sometime in the 1950’s, judging by the cars in the background.
8-inch howitzer
Here is an image I found online of an 8-inch howitzer being fired.
8-inch howitzer being fired
Notice the soldier on the left holding his hands over his ears.
Both the 8-inch howitzer and the Honest John could carry nuclear weapons, and my father’s unit was trained to use them.
In those days, the US was preparing to use tactical nuclear weapons to fight the USSR. Take a moment to imagine that.
After my father retired from the reserves, the US started changing the structure of the reserves. After that, the reserves didn’t have combat units. They all became supply and service units. My father would not have liked that.
I think my father actually enjoyed many parts of his military service, even including combat. He was a forward observer. The life expectancy of a forward observer in combat was short.
He told us quite a few stories about the war. I urged him for a long time to write a memoir, and finally, when he was around 81 or so, he started. My father was not one to rush into anything, so he spent a long time preparing. He put up a WW II-vintage map on the wall downstairs where he had his computer, and he started writing. It seemed like he wrote for a long time. He died in 2000 before his 83rd birthday. A while after he died, I went down and started reading his memoirs. He gave a lot of details about his training, and he told about going to England. He talked about getting ready to land in Belgium, not too long after D-Day.
And then the story ended. He died before he finished writing the most important part of the whole story.
When I think about the monumental events of those days and the part my father played in them, however small it might have been, it makes me sad to think that those experiences are lost. Forever. There will be no first-had account, and when my brother and I are gone, there will no longer be even second-hand accounts.
We emailed Leah’s brother to see what he knows about their father’s service. If he can tell us anything, we’ll post that later.
When my brother and I were little kids, my father used to take us for walks along the railroad tracks between his mother’s house and our house. It was the same track, the same woods, the same creek where he played as a kid. We would cross the railroad bridge over Martha Berry Blvd, throw a few rocks into the oily pond in the abandoned rock quarry behind the VW dealer, then usually climb the little hill that the tracks cut through. The cut was just high enough for us to see the tops of the freight cars if a train happened to pass. One winter day we decided to build a fire in a little notch at the top of the cut. It was a cozy little place down out of the wind, with rocks to sit on and a convenient place to build a fire. We gathered dead wood and whatever we could find and had our fire. I don’t remember many details about that day or the days after – it was more than 50 years ago, after all – and that’s probably a good thing, because it means I don’t remember much about the terrible poison ivy rash I got. It was on my face, in my ears, even in my nose, everywhere that the smoke from the fire touched bare skin. I’m lucky it didn’t get into my lungs.
When my brother and I were young, we spent a lot of time every summer itching and scratching and getting calamine lotion dabbed on us. My father, on the other hand, could pull poison ivy plants out of the ground with his bare hands and never get a single blister. I don’t know about my mother, because she never ran like a wild animal through the woods, totally oblivious to whatever green plants we were crashing through. As an adult, I almost never get a poison ivy rash. Maybe a few blisters here and there, but nothing serious.
I was reminded of this a little over two weeks ago when I found some poison ivy in my mother’s yard while we were clearing out 10 years’ worth of overgrowth. I was cutting small shrubs, maple seedlings and a lot of undergrowth in the midst of a lot of ground cover like vinca and ivy. It turned out that there were a few poison ivy plants here and there. I saw some of it, but not all. This is how I know.
My little rash
This has all the characteristics. It’s itchy. It’s a red, inflamed, itchy mass of blisters. Did I mention that it’s itchy?
I’m not sure why it never occurred to us to look for the plants when we were kids. I guess kids don’t do that sort of thing. Certainly any adult with my experience should have developed a good eye for recognizing poison ivy. It’s obvious now that I’m as sensitive as ever, but usually I’m good at identifying it and avoiding it.
Identification is the important part of avoiding poison ivy. We use the same approach in identifying something like poison ivy that the quality control people use to distinguish between good and bad parts in manufacturing, or that the military would use in identifying an incoming enemy missile. It’s called pattern recognition, or, in the missile defense world, discrimination. We do it all the time. We recognize family or friends at a distance. We can tell a good apple from a bad apple. We recognize an old tortoise friend. We’re so good at it that we can see patterns where there aren’t really any. Like bears in the stars, a goose in a cloud, or Jesus in a piece of toast.
We recognize the patterns by features. In the case of faces, it’s the actual features we recognize. Nose, eyes, mouth, hair. The usual. In the case of a bad apple, it might be a dark spot, or a mushy feel. In the case of poison ivy, the key feature is a set of three leaves: Leaves of three, let it be. That is really a very important feature, and even though there are other plants that have leaf triplets, there is another saying that applies when it comes to poison ivy: Better safe than sorry. With poison ivy, as with incoming nuclear missiles, you really prefer false positives to false negatives.
This is almost all poison ivy, although there is at least one little oak there. This and the following pictures were taken near our house when I took the dogs for a walk. It had rained that day, so the leaves are shinier than usual.
This is a pretty easy test
As I mentioned, there are other plants with three leaves. Kudzu is a good example, and, unfortunately, poison ivy and kudzu are often intermixed. We also find a good bit of muscadine in many of the same places that we find poison ivy.
Poison ivy plus some muscadine above
Here is some poison ivy and kudzu. The kudzu is in the right part of the picture. It’s really not easy to tell the difference here, but it is a little easier in person.
Poison ivy plus kudzu
Kudzu is tricky. It has three leaves, and the leaves themselves resemble poison ivy. Unpleasant experience teaches how to tell the difference. Poison ivy often – but not always – has serrated leaves, and the pattern of veins on the leaves is different from kudzu. It’s fairly easy to mistake kudzu for poison ivy, but it’s almost impossible to mistake poison ivy for kudzu. At least for me.
Blackberries also have leaves of three, and if you verbally described a poison ivy leaf, you might think a blackberry leaf was similar. But they really aren’t very similar.
Blackberries have leaves of three, too
Poison ivy also grows as a vine. Here are two vines. Please excuse the quality of these shots. I had two leashed dogs on one hand and my phone in the other.
One is dangerous and the other is not
Poison ivy is on the left. This vine grew way up into an oak, with branches that extended out several feet from the trunk. These two vines don’t really look all that similar in person, but there is a good feature to look for if you get a little closer. Poison ivy vines are very hairy. Leave them alone. And especially do not put them in a fire.
Hairy vine
When I write something like this, I like to look the subject up to learn as much as possible. In this case, it wasn’t much. I have been so attuned to poison ivy for so long that I already knew pretty much everything I found online. There are lots of Web sites that describe poison ivy and give hints about identifying it. This is one, but there are others.
I’m sure you recognized the title from the Coasters song:
“Poison ivy, poison ivy
Late at night while you’re sleeping, poison ivy comes a’ creepin’
Around”