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i dont remember getting this ,, a perfect attendance award in the 7th grade in 1969.. an older sister sent it to me along with a bunch of pictures of me and other family members i had never seen before .. what i want to find are my presidents physical fitness awards i won about the same time period signed by the honorable Richard Nixon himself .. well .. maybe not so honorable after all ..
ahh yes .. i remember it well ... as i ride around i come across places that bring back good and bad memories from long ago . for the next several posts i will relate some of them as well as the scenery that awakens them .. 50 or more years ago there was a dairy farm on this property and as various vehicles and farm implements fell in disrepair they would be parked on this back lot in with the milk cows to rot away .. not the milk cows rotting but the vehicles ..as you drove around this curve in the road you could look at the back corner of the pasture and see numerous cars and trucks and a few steel wheeled tractors from the 20s thru the 50s .. i was a fledgling hot rodder at the time so i had not much interest in them except to notice them on the way by .. then one day everything was gone ,, the old homestead and dairy barn was torn down and a big new house built .. but i still have a picture in my mind ..
Nostalgia eh?
Just recently we went back to where I lived as a kid nearly sixty years ago.
Things have changed...tremendously.
I pedalled my push bike around those streets after school delivering groceries for the corner store, knew every one of them well.
Landmarks have gone...vanished...as if they'd never been.
Nostalgia.
It ain't what it used to be.
It's a thing of the past.
of little interest to most people but i am fascinated by this .. at my last job that i spent 28 years at we had the same maintenance man for about 15 of those years .. an older man who drove a ratty old chevy pickup ands i would see him almost daily as i worked in receiving and his supplies came thru me .. anywho the years role on and one friday i have to work over a few minutes and i notice a long black limo pulling into the parking lot and the maintenance man gets in it and off it goes .. left his work truck where it was parked .. i ask a fellow employee " what`s up with that ? " .. he says " you dont know who that is " .. no i dont ..,, that limo belongs to John Hendricks .. the owner of the Discovery Channel .. the maintenance man is his brother .. every friday that limo comes to take him to the airport and a private jet flys him anywhere in the world he wants to go ..turns out John grew up in Huntsville got his learning here moved away and made his fortune .. i knew a gazillionaires brother and never knew it .. HA !
Anyone who says money can't buy happiness doesn't know the right places to shop
memories ... pressed between the pages of my mind ... or at least what little there is left of it .. along with old age come CRS . " Cant Remember Stuff " .. but i do have a memory or two of this bridge ,, lots of good drag racing took place here at hump creek ,, a 200 ft long concrete launch pad and a half mile of straight rd ahead ,, the finish line was actually another bridge a little over an 1/8 th mile away then you had to woa down pretty quickly to make a nearly 90 decree left turn or end up in the woods .. one fellow unfamiliar with the rd did not make that turn .. killed him and 3 buddies but they were`nt racing they were just plain speeding ..i remember a 67 cutlass with a swapped in 455 and a 429 super cobra torino squaring off here twice .. the torino won taking off from the concrete at a dead start but the cutlass won from a rolling start .. they never made a third pass as the state trooper who lived on the same rd came and put an end to our fun ,, apparently we only had one trooper in north bama in the early 70`s as he was the one who always came ..he would tell us to go somewhere else .. we also had miles creek / lick skillet / macon rd / huricane rd / plenty of places to act a fool ..
you've heard of the tree of life .. this is the tree of death .. monster of thing sitting barely 3 feet off the hiway .. waiting to jump out in front of passerbys who are texting or drunk or whatever else makes you lose control .. iv`e lost one friend to this tree back in the early 70`s tried to knock it down in a 69 torino at over 90 mph .. another friend survived splitting his car in half .. it was the olds cutlass in the last post ..i dont know the person responsible for the cross standing there .. this is about a mile and half from my home .. most like plenty more folks have tasted the bark here ..
we pause from our regularly scheduled thread for this important inquirery ... anyone on here a member of city data forums ? i asked for a permanent ban a year or so ago and i want to take it back .. boredom of other sites has made me want to open them back up .. they just have such jerkwad mods and i have to be a bit more careful in my posts ..i am also HOSS429 there and if you could let them know i want to be unbanned i would be grateful ..they wont respond to any correspondence i try ..
Darwin has a theory about those whom can't outwit a tree.
I'd never heard of City Data so I googled them -Quote:
Originally Posted by HOSS429
Hoss, you must be REALLY, REALLY bored!! :rolleyes::confused::LOL:**)Quote:
A relocation forum that claims to allow all points of view but is really just a front for Realtors. Moderators are given extreme power and control to ban members that they disagree with. If you post anything negative about a city or state you will eventually be banned.
:eek::eek::LOL::LOL::p:p:eek::):D**)Quote:
Originally Posted by rspears
Sometimes you just gotta laugh! ;)
got a little anxious scare the other day .. coming home from work i notice smoke in the distance .. in the general area where i call home ..turned on my road and the fire was obviously on my street .. did i forget to turn off the little heater in the bathroom or something .. i speed up a bit .. turns out it was a neighbors house just down the street a bit .. the older owners had both passed away recently and the grandson ( new owner ) had the house burned down by the local fire department .. he is tearing down everything they ever achieved in their 80 plus years of living .. clearing the land to no doubt sell it for a huge payday .. that happens so much around here .. as with the dairy farm a few posts back ..
Now there's something I haven't seen in decades. Burning a house by the F.D. , to much pollution being released is the fear, esp'y if the house had lead paint, it'll be all over the neighbors houses now.
my home is surrounded by about 60 trees of various kinds ..i have a neighbor who complains every time i burn a few piles of leaves .. i remind him that i can burn my leaves every day for the next 10000 years and not raise as much smoke as a california wildfire does in one minute .. yes ,, the shingle roof on the old house made for a lot of black toxic smoke .. some of it blew my way ...
So Hoss, when the grandson sells what type of place do you expect will replace this house that he had burned? Since you mentioned turning down "your street", and the neighbor whining about smoke from leaves burning it sounds like you're in a neighborhood development with small acreage plots as opposed to big farms with lots of acres for crops and/or grazing. Do you see folks coming in, buying property, knocking down the structures and then building McMansions around there?
i have never delved in real estate so i dont know what works best for a potential buyer .. there has been both situations you speak of happen within the last 30 years around me .. a 30 acre parcel adjacent and behind me was bought by my current neighbor on the right .. he already very wealthy from building and selling high dollar houses all over the place .. he put a double wide mobile home on 10 acres and sold the other 20 for double what he gave for all of it ,, some people can turn a dime into a dollar in a minute .. not me .. the new owner built a half million dollar house in the middle of his property and fenced it all off for privacy .. on down the road a bit 20 years ago a 100 acre farm was sold with a half mile of road frontage and broken up into small lots and dozens of 100 grand to maybe 150 grand houses built and snapped up immediately .. this property where the house was burned is not laid out very well . there is only about 300 feet of road frontage for a dozen acres of land so i imagine it will sit well with someone who wants to build big and be left alone ..
so geeses and gooses fly south for the winter does that mean sea gulls must fly north ? .. mite be a climate change thing but iv`e never seen these beast in north bama before ,, i guess they are gulls .. this one is chowing down on a BK whopper someone left in the parking lot .. maybe they follow the tennessee river upstream or something ,, a little bit bigger than a crow .. neat looking ..
Yep. That's a seagull alright; the same as we get here in NZ.
In the winter months they do tend to fly inland, and they will scavenge anything.
They do congregate in flocks, but when food is scarce they more often fly solo but within sight of each other.
When one sights a dead animal or a paddock that has been recently cultivated he drops. His neighbour sees him drop and heads for where he dropped. His neighbour sees him drop, the fourth one follows suit and so on ad infinitum, and in ten minutes you've got literally hundreds of them.
Gulls are primarily meat eaters, so they've never bothered me.
But we've also got Paradise ducks who are grazing birds. They will decimate a recently planted pasture in a day, by not only eating the blades of grass but pulling the new seedlings out by the roots.
And I've seen hundreds of those bloody things all in one paddock too.
Your picture and story hit home with me today. I recently drove by one of the farms my grand father worked on. The guy that bought their farm hired my grandpa to work for him after the sale. I drive by the farm often but never go down the road and get close by. It is crazy how things can be the same for years and then all of a sudden the while landscape or scenery changes. They finally scrapped the old White and MF tractors my grandpa plowed and fed the cows with. What a sad day.Quote:
Originally Posted by HOSS429
Seeing how we're talking about old school farming. My mom's father grew up in Wisconsin and his dad had a cheese factory. The stories he had about delivering milk before school in an old Model T truck with wood wheels wrapped with chains sure makes you appreciate what we have today. These young ones today would flat out die if they had to live back then. This grandpa passed away last year. I always felt he had it rough but knew my dad's mother had it rough as well. I actually feel she had it worse. She grew up in North Carolina and her dad was a farmer. They were still farming with horse and plow and hoes operated by them. They were always very poor and had a really rough time through the depression etc. I've worked fields like that, horse drawn and hand sewn, but only 5 acres for 2 seasons when I was in high school. To have to do that every year for your food/money is a darn hard way to live. Once again, I sure do appreciate how things are today but they didn't have to deal with a lot of the BS we have now. I'd like to video my 89 year old grandmother to have something my kids can watch some day. I wish I would have done that with my mom's dad. The story just isn't the same coming from the next person and it's history like this that needs instilled in young people today IMO.
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if i did`nt see ... i would`nt believe it !!! ...no not a UFO or a Sasquatch but things as equally odd to me as those ...last year . even though i live in the rattlesnake infested south i had never seen a live one .. cruising thru the end of the Appalachian mountains here in north bama i spotted a large one crossing the road in front of me one time . i wowed up and got out to get a close up look at it ... later i swear i saw a black bear at a local stream i visit regularly .. no one else has seen one outside of the mountains in new market .. i know for a fact i saw an eagle as i got a picture of it but it is locked away in photobucket ..and i saw a black man riding a horse one day ..i had never seen that .. well starting off this year i have a new never seen list started .. i just saw a three legged deer ..iv`e seen cats and dogs with limbs successfully amputated but never what would be considered a wild critter .. it was right out in the open standing next to a house with a fawn .. i turned around and went back to get a picture and it stayed in place for a second but ran off because other traffic was nearing .. how does a three legged deer happen or survive .. i think it must be taken care by how it let me get close to it .. it was a crowded neighborhood ..
Rattlesnakes, diamond backs, were plentiful at Camp Pendleton when I was there in the early to mid 60's. There was a guy, Cajun, in one of the outfits that used to hunt them a night when we in the bush. I don't ever remember him not coming in with a least one and as he would enter the area he would shake the rattles which would cause certain folks to hastily exit.
He'd cut off the rattles and skin them and cook them over an open fire, not bad tasting but a tad greasy.
I'm enjoying reading your posts and your reminiscing. I bought my farm off a William (Bill) Balsom. Bill bought the farm by buying into a partnership with his older brother, and had eventually bought his brother out.
His older brother had done the same thing, by buying into a partnership with their oldest brother and he too had eventually bought the oldest brother out.
The oldest brother had bought the farm from the Wright brothers, they too were in a partnership, and were still in partnership when they sold up just after WWII.
Winefride (Winnie,) Wright, the only child of both Wright brothers, married Colin Malcom.
Not long after I'd bought the farm I asked Mrs Malcom (nicely,) if she could put to paper her memories of the place.
She was terribly pleased that I was interested enough in the history of the place to take the trouble to find out more about it.
She came up trumps.
She wrote about the struggles of two English immigrants coming to a block of solid bush halfway up the side of a mountain, who had no knowledge of farming of any description, and were the first people to settle and work on this virgin block.
She really did a great job, describing the wild bush fires of the 30's, unco-operative horses, the actual clearing and draining of the place...I was both pleased and impressed.
I'd also approached the Balsoms to do the same.
They managed to write half a page as against Winnie's 'book'.
Then I realised I'd better do the same myself.
So I did.
I now have the written history of what was my farm going back over 100 years.
Don't really know what to do with it now.
Today's kids couldn't care less.
JB, that is very cool. I'm sure if you spoke with a local paper, if there are any left in your area, they would probably love to publish it. Or, you could have it printed on metal and affix it to the oldest structure on the property. IMO someone will appreciate it and probably more than you realize in the future. Once those people are gone to tell the stories they lived, if they aren't documented, they're just gone.
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Winnie's story ran to nine pages.
Mine ran to twenty-one.
She wasn't the one out there wielding the axe or the saw or digging the post holes.
Whereas I was.
The Balsoms did virtually nothing to improve the place during their tenure. The two older ones came out five or six years after we'd bought it, and I commented about how what fences there were on the place when I bought it were in a dilapidated state, and the oldest one (Can't think of his Christian name at the moment,) said "Well of course they fell down; the posts rotted."
Hello? That's where you get a spade out and replace it. It's called 'maintenance'.
Yep, our local newspapers (all three of them,) are still extant. And perhaps I should approach them to see if they're interested in publishing. I just hadn't thought of them before.
I mean...do people really want to read about the story of one particular farm?
In my neck of the woods that story would make a great sunday feature. Lots of folks still care about what things happened in the past on a place local to them. You won't ever know if you don't ask. I'd say go for it!!
was`nt that how the Tv show " Little house on the prairie " got it`s start .. someone writing down day to day family history .. i remember my mothers father a little bit .. he was born in 1866 he died in 1965 almost a week from being 100 ..i was nine at the time ., imagine talking to someone who went through all the changes in those 99 years .. i dont know a thing about him .. what he did for a career .. what he thought of electricity when it came out .. or airplanes or automobiles or radio or tv ..i do have one story involving him and my father that i have yet to compose ..Quote:
Originally Posted by johnboy
Your son TJ ended up keeping the place in the family, right? I'd say at the very least he would enjoy having the history, and if you self published it into a hard bound or paper bound booklet so much the better! If you put the file on a memory stick he can add his years down the road, to keep the story going.
HA !! i love these new geico commercials .. the cloggers ... the fencers .. and the latest .. the pipes ... i laugh every time it comes on .. i wish i could reach them and suggest a new one ,, we love this old house but we have a problem with bugs ... then bugs bunny comes out .. what`s up dock ,,,
Sunday Sunday Sunday !!! we`ll sell you the whole seat .. bla bla bla .. you know the rest .. anywho this is Macon rd in Mooresmill north bama .. one of the best scenes of Sunday evening street drags in the area .. you can see for over a mile straight ahead and equally as far north and south down the adjoining road ..primarily a black neighborhood but i had a black fellow pinto hotrodder who allowed this white guy to hang around .. there would be upwards of 20 cars here on any given Sunday .. we were allowed to park in several nearby driveways and work up races ..i had my pinto there a time or two but never found a car slow enuff to line up against .. the feature race one day was a blown big block 66 chevelle vs a nos assisted also big block vega .. the vega was a regular strip car that ran 5.30`s in the 8th .. i had never seen the chevelle at the strip ..the two runs they tried to make the vega would leap out in front then go up in smoke and the chevelle had to get out of it .. i dont know if they settled it later at the strip .. .. i did git a blurry shot of the three legged deer but it`s not worth posting ...
i scowered back a few thousand posts and realize i have not posted a picture of my pinto .. it`s the only hotrod i have left .. i peruse the local parts for sale adds every day still looking for a 5 speed trans to shoe horn in it .. ebay has the occasional one for upwards of 1000 $ or more but i`m waiting on getting a whole vehicle for that or less ..when i put the 4.3 V6 in it came from behind a standard shift truck but silly me went with a turbo 350 instead as the pinto was already an automatic car ..i am also in need of a rear end .. i guess i`m gunna have to find an 8 inch out of something and narrow it few inches .. that is not beyond me .. a friend has a couple of mustang 2 8 inch rears that would be a direct bolt in but will not let me get one .. some friend huh .
What a neat little car Hoss! Good luck on the parts search, hope you find all your goodies!
Great Pinto Hoss! That one reminded me of this other one! :D
i built a V8 pinto very similar and based on that car back in 78 or so .. that is one on my old cars i`m still looking for .. i hear rumors of it being around from time to time .. just never have lucked up on it .. its` hard to look in shut garage doors from just driving by .. the fellow i sold it to murdered his wife a few years later and spent like 30 years in prison .. i go to the area he lived in and neighbors remember him and the car but dont know what became of it .. i wish i had pictures from back then .. i dont know if i ever mentioned it here but i worked briefly with Bob Gliddens brother in law .. he got me a t shirt in the early 80`s .. it had the tbird that Bob destroyed in Atlanta i think .. i wore it so much it did not last long ,,Quote:
Originally Posted by 34_40
that was one scary car. we had several people build pintos back then but they were a handful to drive. one i remember had a 460 in it . damn thing was like an Anglia . out of shape every pass but cool as hell .
Someplace 'round here I have a picture or two of me & Bob Glidden. It was taken at Englishtown, in the 90's if I remember right.
It was his last national event win. I had asked him to sign my hat as well. Heck of a nice guy! After the race we ( my friend Ted and I ) walked around the trailers and collected autographs. So we're standing in line to get one from that Snake Prudohme, (sic) when we got to him after all the waiting he walked away from us!! I started yelling he had the right nickname an f_ _ _in snake, what a piece of _h_t! Can you tell I'm still pissed about it??? LOL...
Attachment 73366Attachment 73365
I was wearing this when he signed it at Topeka around 02 maybe. I had forgotten that he won To Fuel at the 65 Winternationals and yes I was there and bought the shirt there.
very cool!
LIKE
snake and mongoose came to huntsville and raced on the old airport in 69 or so .. i was there but only 13 and dont remember a whole lot about it ,, i do remember a lot of noise ..
welcome to alabama ...
https://youtu.be/s5LtR0EAR84
you ask .. what do you do HOSS when your`e not telling hilarious jokes and riveting stories of days of yore .. well .i spend more time on you tube than i do on the TV .. i cant stand most music so i rarely if ever listen to the radio .. when i did turn on the radio it was to listen to conservative talk shows most of all who have now been silenced thanks to the latest election ..i have a playlist on you tube that i play at least once a week of songs and music i can tolerate .. i love piano music as i can play a few notes myself but hardly anything like this .. if you watched Tom and Jerry much growing up you may recognize the tune .
https://youtu.be/LdH1hSWGFGU
