A Bigot is:

: a person who strongly and unfairly dislikes other people, ideas, etc. : a bigoted person;especially : a person who hates or refuses to accept the members of a particular group (such as a racial or religious group) according to Mr. Webster, this is the definition of a Bigot. 

You may not like my flags or monuments, i may not like yours, but as my friend Judy Jacobs says, "as Americans we have the right to wave our flags and have our monuments. no one certain race or religion has a handle or a patent on bigotry. we all do. sad but true. Deo Vindice. 

i find it amusing that with all the flap over the Confederate flag, the flag makers, and flag sellers are making out like bandits in the humming world of trade and commerce. keep pulling them down and someone will keep putting them back up. Amazon in now allowing Confederate flags to be sold again on line. 

Make it you ambition, to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your hands, just as we told you 

1 Thessalonians 4:11

Go Set A Watchman

This morning i finished Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, the squeal to her iconic To Kill A Mockingbird.  I loved it, it will most likely go into my top ten favorite books of all time, i have read a lot of books. Some people fearful to read it because friends did not like it or the review were bad, need to get new friends and quit reading book reviews. Enough said.

The book is different and yet a lot like Mockingbird, a lot of the major players from To Kill A Mockingbird are gone, either dead or written out, or actually not written in at all because the newest Lee novel is the original. The book is about going  home, Tom Wolf said you never could. But at some point in our life for various reasons we all have to. This is what Jean Marie "Scout" Finch did. 

The newest Harper Lee work introduced a new character, Dr. Finch, Atticus' brother, he is now my favorite Harper Lee character. Every small town has a Dr Finch, our town has Page Chamberlain, a brilliant scholarly Southern gentleman, a bit eccentric with a huge heart, who knows were ever skeleton in our county is located. 

pretty soon i am going to make my trip home, to my firs real home, Dickson, Tennessee. i am going to look up my old friend Butch Hooper and we are going to wander among ghosts. i want to stop at my grandparent's store and see if i can see a little boy wandering among the fields or drinking free Cokes all day long. We will see. 

For the Chattanooga Marines, Brothers All

I am enclosing the words from the epitaph from the grave of a young Marine killed on Guadalcanal many decades ago. It if as fitting today as it was seventy years ago. As I post this I am thinking of all the Marines I have know all of my life. Barry Townes, Dudley Jones, Nick Stewart, Dustin Hickman, Will Craig, Don Geving, Warren Fuson, John Caudle, and Andrew Carpenter. There are many more, This is for you.


 And when he goes to heaven
To Saint Peter he will tell
Another Marine reporting, sir
I've served my time in hell!

I know Andrew, Dudley, John and Warren are there now helping them get adjusted. Semper fi gentlemen, i am proud of you all. 

Rode hard and put up wet to dry

it has been a long day at the villa. Swanky Plank Vintage Market ran it's first full day today and we had a yard and a house full. lots of really nice people. met a family from Copley, Ohio which is a stones throw from where sarge grew up in Medina County, Ohio. we hailed each other with the big OH IO as they left the mansion. i love my buckeyes. i am finding all of  my northern guests passionately telling me they are angry about America's newest run of Joe McCarthyism, the flap over pulling the confederate flag down. Thanks to the politically brigade we have sold out of all of our confederate flags and decals we just got in last week. Our distributor is two weeks behind in filling orders. We may have to bury  the silver in the yard again soon. We  have diverse crew, several of us have Confederate ancestry, my buddy Jason, a man i love like a brother, we taught together for almost ten years, he and his family are the Rippavilla lawn crew. Jason is a member of the Sons of Union Veterans, having a distant uncle and granddaddy from Illinois who fought in the Battle of Spring Hill in 1864. Mr. Cost one of our volunteers is commander of the SCV camp i am in. His mother is from Wadsworth, Ohio. Sarge's hometown. Enough. 
Got home and unloaded, my 1864 clothes are now in the washing mashing (warsher). A hot shower and a couple of Great Lakes Brews along with a Kosher treat, i am ready to crash. will see you all at the villa in the morning. mazel  tov to all.

Hanging out today and waiting for the big event.

Rippavilla has been a center of insanity for the past few days. The cause of this insanity is The Swanky-plank Vintage Market. It is our big fund raiser. It starts tomorrow. I like this type of insanity. We have a great director, great staff and some very hard working board members. I look forward to the big event every July. The picker comes out in me and i scour the show looking for treasures i can take home and horde away with my other treasures. The thrill of the hunt gets me every time and with sarge looking around on her own, i can guarantee i will find some cool things. There will be great carnival food. The best burgers and fish sandwiches ever, and there will be live music. I am not a huge fan of the live music having grown up in Nashville were even a local pizza joint can be a live  music venue.
The old mansion will be up to speed, after all vintage market is for her. Like and old battle ship she needs lots of powder and paint. Our tours are half price starting at four on Thursday, we will have docents in every room in costume, another reason i like working during this event. anyone taking a house tour will more than get their money's worth. more detail per room. i always take the dining room where the generals had breakfast on the morning of November 30, 1864.  Nobody will have to attack Franklin after the tour! Our shop has loaded up on items and i just got in a new shipment of books this past week.

If you are a John Prine fan, might ought to make sure you have a copy of Paradise, my favorite Prine song. Peabody Coal Company wants to take it away. Seems Mr. Peabody's legal beagles want the lyrics describing how Mr. Peabody's Coal company done carried it all away is offensive to the corporate politically correct. they think it makes them look bad. go figure. i may have to hid my John Prince CD alongside my Stanley Horn books and my Confederate flags until some level of sanity returns to our nation. Shalom ya'll. Hopefully no one was offended.

Sarge and i had a road-trip to Nashville today. Had a good time touring the Country Music Hall of Fame. Lots of cool stuff to see. I liked it a lot, but i will say, it does not come close to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Down town Nashville is a lunatic asylum all day today, with many streets already being blocked off this morning for various July Fourth events. We paid thirty dollars to park for four hours. Yep!
We made our way down Charlotte and overland a few blocks to Clinton Street. We had a wonderful lunch at a place called The Ole South Smoke House. Great food and even better service. The place is spotless clean! Their restrooms rival mine at Rippavilla in cleanliness. Impressive. We also visited the pickers store Antique Archaeology. Lots of smalls, not bad prices, lots of tee shirts, ball caps, bandannas and coffee cups. Lost of NFS  stuff too. I found an old Indian Motorcycle that I would kill to have. Don't think Sarge would let me keep it in the den.

I got the sad news this morning about the passing of my old friend and neighbor Mr. Dudley Jones up in Nashville where I grew up. He was a great man one of the best. He was the father of three of my earliest childhood friends in Nashville. He and his bride Thelma were a fixture in our South Nashville neighborhood around Glencliff High and Glencliff Elementary schools. Always involved in helping the neighborhood kids and making our neighborhood a little bit better, Not for financial gain, just because it was the right thing to do.

The Dairy King a local eatery in South Nashville was Jones' family establishment for over forty years, the best meat and three, ice cream treats and fried chocolate pies in the world. Nancy still insists that if I am near the Dairy King a pie had better follow me home. 

Dudley was a member of a unique band of brothers, The Chosin Few. As a kid in Nashville he found himself with many of his buddies in the local Marine Reserve Company suddenly trust from peace time Nashville Nashville to the horrors of the War in Korea in 1950. They would land at Inchon and advance all the way to the Chosin Reservoir and that's where they marched into the gates of hell. The Chinese had secretly crossed the Yalu River in November and secretly entered the war. MacArthur would deny the Chinese invasion until the proof was thrust upon him 250,000 times. The Marines and remnants of part of the U.S Army Second Infantry Division were surrounded. Dudley was there. Temperatures often hit 45 below zero. 

The Americans, mostly Marines, with a few British Marines along with them fought their way out of the red encirclement several times, finally making it to the sea and safety, even making sure their wounded and many of their dead were not left behind. Many consider the Chosin Reservoir or the Frozen Chosin the greatest moment in the history of Dudley's beloved United States Marine Corps. 

I remember as a child spending many hours at the Jones' house in front of the fire. Dudley always kept one going when it was cold outside. I remember one cold snow night a bunch of us spent the night in the basement and at one point Jeff and I going outside for wood. There was Dudley standing by the woodpile on that cold moonlit night looking up the hill towards Glencliff stadium, He was dead silent, as if in another place, just watching the horizon. I have often wondered for the many years since then was his stare transfixed to another time in his life. Had the snowy moonlit hillside behind the stadium gone from south Nashville to the frozen wastes of Korea. I think so, someday, if i am real good, i will ask Corporal Dudley Jones USMC. Semper Fi!

To Saint Peter he will proudly say

One more Marine reporting sir, I've severed my  time in Hell.

The man with his mother's smile came into the courtyard of Rippavilla today. I had only seen him once since he left for Vietnam a lifetime ago, and that was at mt grandmother's funeral in 1990 when i returned to my hometown of Dickson, Tennessee to bury my beloved Mama Byrn. Butch Hooper lived behind us in Dickson, he was my buddy Randy's big brother and by proxy he became my big brother too. We have been facebook friend for a while, but had not seen each other in twenty five years. When he spoke and smiled, I knew that a huge part of my early childhood had come home.
Butch's family was my family, his father, the world's greatest biscuit maker used to leave me a buttered biscuit on the back of the stove every morning, he knew I would ramble up the alley to the Hooper house every morning. In those days, kids could do that. Dickson was a great place to be a kid. I could eat a biscuit at Hooper's or I could walk up Church Street at the age of four and get a loaf of bread for my mom. Mom would stand on the front porch and watch me walk up the street to Mr Hood's store, where you could get a coke for a dime and a candy bar for a dime, and Mrs Hood would stand in the door way of the store and watch as I walked down the street home.
Somehow, I think Heaven may be laid out like that. At least I hope so. Thanks Butch for stopping by today and making my week. I called mom as soon as I finished my tour and sent her your love. God  bless you my friend.