At Last, The Bucky of Nelsondom

All right ladies and gentlemen and sports fans of all ages, the time has finally come for tales of Bucky Nelson. By the way Nick, my blogs are long, tough noogies, get over it.

Bucky Nelson was born Harry Lynn Nelson or that's what his folks named him anyway. He was named after his mean grandfather who owned the other store/gas station in atomic City. It was at the opposite end of town as Fackrell's Texaco, probably less than 1/4th of a mile away on the only paved street in town and was a Utoco station. He (Grandpa Nelson) may not have been mean. My only memory of him is when he was yelling at me for stealing "politically incorrect named for African-American" babies. The filter would not print the name, but that's what they were called. They were made of rather hard licorice shaped like a baby and were two for a penny but I didn't have a penny or an old beer bottle (also worth a penny) to trade for them. It could have been my first attempt at crime in my checkered past. Holy Crap! I really am digressing. Back to Bucky. His dad was not too fond of the name Harry (or his own dad of that name) so he called little Harry, Buckshot. Which got shortened to Bucky, and stuck. My earliest memory of Bucky is when he first moved to town, my friend Lecky and I were throwing rocks at him for some reason that escapes me now. Bucky was 6' 3" tall and weighed 203 lbs. He was definitely the biggest kid in the third grade (we were in the 2nd grade at the time). As we were running away from him, he caught Lecky by the shirt (I was much faster then) and proceeded to throw him in the air then pound the crap out of him when he came down. This is when I thought he'd make a much better friend than an enemy, so I started to help him pound the crap out of Lecky. By the way, Lecky's real name was Lester, also named after his grandfather who they called Leck. Lecky had been my best friend up to this point but was much smaller and easier to beat up. Oddly enough, he remained my best friend and fully understood my motive in switching alliances and said he would have done the same if he could have out run me.

This seems long and may have outdistanced Nick's attention span but I want to tell one more about Bucky. One bright summer day found the two of us out at the town dump searching for treasures. Fine stuff like broken wagons to slide down the trash hill in, old comic books, dirty magazines, whatever. I was at the top part of the hill where people would dump the trash and let it slide down the side of the hill, when, low and behold! I found the best treasure in the whole of trashdom! It was a huge glass insulator from an old power line! It was shaped like a bell and about 6" tall and 5" across the bottom. It even had a couple feet of wire left on it! "I must show this wonderful treasure to Bucky," said my little mind. " I know, I'll throw it down to him so he can marvel at its wondrousness." So a couple spins around my head, and off it goes, in the air, right at Bucky's head. Since he was looking the other way and it was rapidly approaching his cranium, my tiny mind kicked in and decided I should let him know it was coming. "HEY!" I shouted. Just in time for him to turn toward me and have the rather large glass insulator hit him above his left ear and drop him like a ton of bricks, rendering him unconscious. A more empathetic boy would have been concerned about Bucky's well-being, however, being more pathetic than empathetic, and also being fully aware of his quick temper, I knew he would eventually awaken and kill whoever threw the stupid thing at him. Thus being much more concerned for my welfare than his, I started running for town as fast as my pudgy legs could take me. Looking back, I saw him get up, rub his head and with steam/smoke coming out of his ears, seek the object of his hatred. It seamed like 436 miles I ran with him right on my heels until I finally made it to the safe-haven of the Women's bathroom at Fackrell's Texaco station. He pounded on the door for awhile (but NOT on me) until he got tired and went home. He was fine the next day with really not that big of a lump over his left ear. We even went back to the dump to see if we could find the glass insulator, but it had become someone else's treasure... we never found it.

Next time, The of Bucky Nelson.

MRI not BMI (Big Monsterous Idiocy)

For the myriads of you who are anxiously awaiting tales of Bucky Nelson, you'll have to wait one more blog. I just can't bear to let the BMI thing go by without making a comment other than the one I made on Linda's blog. Ladies please, oh please, do NOT fall into the trap of thinking that somehow a machine or chart can tell you if you are fat or not. The only real way to accurately measure body-fat is to be weighed under water. That gets your specific gravity and is absolutley correct but who cares anyway. For the better part of my career in the AIr Force, every human wearing the USAF uniform was subject to MAW. Good old MAW. It stood for Maximum Allowable Weight. Much like BMI the chart, it decided that if you were so tall, say 72" the absolute most you could weigh and still be usable cannon fodder was 211 lbs. That's it, end of story. Whatever height you were, you had a MAW. If you were caught being over that MAW you were put on the Fat Boy program and made to suffer further indignation at the hands of medical personnel, your First Sergeant, commander and anyone else who thought you might be too fat to live. My "normal" weight then was 220 lbs. At that weight I felt, functioned, and looked pretty darned good. I could, and did manage to starve myself down to that 211 when I knew a weigh-in was coming but the whole concept was/is ridiculous. I complained for years that they should target fat people not heavy people. The only way to get that MAW adjusted was to go to The medical center at Lackland AFB and be wieghed under water like I described before. It was way past stupid. Finally, about three years before I retired, they went to measuring body fat instead of just using that MAW crap. They would measure your neck, waist, and hight (and hips for women). They would then subtract the neck measurement from the waist one throw some chicken bones, spin around three times, chant unintelligible phrases to the East, then use that number with your height to look up your fattitude on a chart to see how much you could weigh. It was TONS better (for me at least) as I never had a problem the rest of my career and did't worry or sweat about forthcoming weigh-ins. So ladies and gentlemen,I am all for Linda's FON but prefer MRI. No, I don't mean that huge magnetic machine that can see soft tissue and pull the fillings right out of your teeth, I mean the Mr. Rogers Index..."I like you just the way you are."

Non-Pyro Fire--Don't try this EVER!

The next and last time I almost burned down the garage had more to do with idiocy and less to do with my pyromaniacal tendencies. I was in high school at the time and had pretty much outgrown my fascination with the pretty yellow flames. Being rather klutsy by nature and by practice I managed to spill some light blue paint on my nice white jeans. I loved those jeans and couldn't afford new ones so I tried to remove the blue with some paint thinner. I must admit it did its job, it made the blue thinner, bigger, but thinner. Now instead of a semi-small blotch of paint, I had a stain roughly the shape and size of Alaska. Well, if a little thinner could do that, why not use even more? I put the blotchy pants in a metal pan and added the rest of the gallon of paint thinner to let them soak. Remember the previously mentioned idiocy? After letting them soak while I watched "Car 54, Where Are You?" or some-such drivel, went out the the garage to see how the thinner had completely removed any tinge of blue. Okay, sot so much. Now the pants were nothing but a thinner-soaked mottled mess. What to do? What to do? I know! Burn them in the stove! I threw the dripping jeans into the stove that Dad had made (see last blog) and set them on fire. Let me tell you, paint thinner added to denim fabric doesn't just make a fire. Oh no, no, nonono. One match and you have a FIRE!!! (boldfaced, underlined, 24 pt font in red)! The stove began to glow. First red, then yellow, then WHITE! I was quite sure concrete couldn't burn but was beginning to doubt it. I was certain the sheer magnitude of the heat going up the stovepipe was going to set fire to the roof. This may have been the point when I promised the Lord I'd go on a mission. I was ready to become a monk, join a convent, absolutely anything to not burn THIS garage to the ground too. I don't know if He took pity on me or was having a good chuckle, but the stove/barrel started to cool down and the fire eventually went out. Every bit of paint had burned off the stove so it was now blackened and no longer the pretty silver color it had been. I re-painted the thing so Dad was none the wiser about my latest attempt at arson. That must have been the culmination of my semi-stellar career as a pyro because I don't remember even being tempted to do anything along those lines again.

Turn out the lights, the pyro's over

The first time I burned down our garage I was probably 8 or 9 years old. With any kind of luck it was before my baptism so I couldn't be held acountable for it but I really think I could have been 10 or 12. We had an old wooden garage that was about 50 feet or so from our house. The house had an attached garage that my dad had converted into a utility room and later enclosed part of it for my bedroom (another story entirely). The wooden garage also had a lean-to against the back of it that was left over from when we lived in a trailor and needed more room so Dad built an addition that "leaned" against the trailor. It now became additional storage space for all sorts of stuff like old mattresses pictures, cloth and whatever you would normally put in the attic if you had one. You need to know that my Mom never threw away ANYTHING, ever, in her whole life. This necessitated a plethora of space to hold the stuff she never threw away. The 4th of July was soon upon us and we were planning to go fishing at Mackey Dam so the folks had purchased some sparklers, bottle rockets, black snakes, and other "harmless" celebratory pyrotechnics for us little kiddies. I lacked the patience to wait for the 4th, or darkness for that matter, so I decided to take a sparkler and go into the realative darkness of the lean-to to watch it sparkle. It was quite anticlmactic what with it being 2 o'clock in the afternoon and not much darker than outside so I let it burn out and tossed it back behind the mattresses. How was I to know with my not-so-well-developed brain that that sucker was still just a few degrees cooler than the surface of the sun? A few hours later someone noticed flames out of the top of the garage and the excitement bagan! It was far too much for the garden hose and soon many neighbors were there dragging our jeep out before it caught fire but were pretty much unable to save anything else. I can still see my Dad hosing down the roof of our house to keep it from catching fire. It took about 30 minutes to get a fire truck there from the atomic energy site that was about 8 miles away and by that time there wasn't much but a smoldering pile of rubble. Burned up in the blaze was our boat & motor, all the camping gear and Dad's $3,000 lathe. $3,000 then was like $4 billion now. The fire was blamed on faulty electrical wiring so I let it. I didn't tell my Mom that it was my fault until one time when she was visiting us in Texas and I was in my 30s and to big to as well as too poor to sue. With the insurance money my Dad built a bigger cinder-block garage with a concrete floor and a nice pit in the middle of it so we could work on the underside of cars. It had electricity but no heat so He built (I swear, the man was McKyver) a stove out of a 50-gallon barrel. It laid on its side on legs he'd welded to it and had a stove pipe that went up through the roof. He cut a door in one end so we could burn wood in it to keep us nice and toasty warm in the winter. Idaho only has two seasons, winter and August so we got a lot of use out of that stove. It also came in handy when I tried to burn this garage down too. More tomorrow...

P.S. There have been questions about who is "s" in my last blog. It was supposed to be "girls" but only the s came out. Babs told me it's because of the cybersitter not allowing the word "girl" so we'll see if any of those words describing a young human female come out in this paragraph. , , s...so there! She was right! That previous sentence was "Girl", "girl", "girl"s...so there! Holy crap! I guess I'm stuck with using quotation marks anytime I want to use that word.

Pyro Part II, The Outhouse

I believe much of my pyromania stemmed from the unenlightened attitude of parents when I was a child. They did such horrible things like tell us to go out and play. They then left it up to us to create our own entertainment and sent us on our way like so many young coyotes. So, not having the "benefit" of nursery school or kindergarten, we set about to invent our own amusement. We pretty much took over anything that had been abandoned whether it be a dynamite shack, old grain combine, building, town dump, or outhouse. These became our forts, clubhouses, etc. One abandoned outhouse in particular was behind the defunct Midway Cafe, it (the cafe, NOT the outhouse) had been a semi-fine greasy spoon where my mother had served as cook before the town incorporated and became known as Atomic City, and she became the town clerk and Justice of the Peace. She was the first woman to marry a couple there (I have the newspaper clipping to prove it). Again, I digress, this outhouse made a great fort because, with the advent of indoor plumbing, the hole underneath had been mostly filled in with dirt and no longer had that lovely fecal odor. A horizontal board was missing on one side (so much for privacy) but the door could still be secured from the inside allowing us to carry on our nefarious deeds free from the prying eyes of humans. We had also dug under the back of the building to allow semi-easy exit should we be discovered by grown-ups or s. On the day that shall live forever in my brain, Chuck Knight found a match. Yes, that's right, a single match left in a discarded matchbook. On any given day in Atomic City, it was either windy or windier so we got our other partner-in-arson, Rick Boisjollie, and adjourned to the out/clubhouse. We also brought some torn up newspaper in a mason jar. With ONE stinking match our opportunity for some nice flames was rather limited. After several failed attempts, Chuck finally lit the match then the newspaper in the jar. At this point things become a bit hazy what with Father Time clouding my memory but at any rate, while we were watching the flames in the bottle, somebody, probably me, thought it would be a grand idea to also set fire to a large piece of cardboard that was on the wooden floor. Ooh, aah, cool fire. Oh oh! The flames are now licking up the door. The LOCKED door. Not wanting for us to become crispy critters, I gathered what puny thoughts I had remaining and shouted, "Down the bumhole boys!" So down said bumhole we rapidly went and climbed out the emergency egress hatch. Whew! Safe at last. We were on the outside and the fire was on the inside. Rick and I thought we'd better put the fire out now since Chuck remembered it was his nap time and ran home. We began the rather futile and puny effort of tossing little handfuls of dirt through the opening in the side left by the missing board. In our defense, we lived in a desert so the thought of using water never entered into our little heads. The conflagration eventually became large enough to attract the attention of some larger human beings who stood around and watched the out/clubhouse burn to the ground. I was certain we would both be beaten (unenlightened remember?) but John Weise, the owner of said outbuilding, showed up and said, "Ah, I was going to get rid of that eyesore anyway, now I don't have to haul it off." Thus we were off the hook and thoroughly unrepentant. Next time, dear readers, how to burn a garage to the ground without really trying.