The banquet and ball were howling successes so far as I was concerned. I made at least two big mistakes. . . I got the vast assortment of spoons and forks pretty well mixed, but soon corrected that by watching the middle-aged woman at my side. The awful and really devastating mistake was due to my appetite. Military School diet was rigid. I was young, healthy and hungry. I noticed my girl minced and toyed with the fish, soup and other preliminaries, but attributed that to some feminine quirk. I ate all mine in stride. When the canvas back, caviar and other unknown real delicacies came along it was too late for me. I was full.
On the ball room floor it was a much different story. I was young, lithe and limber—and absolutely sober. A great many of the deluxe elite were too heavy in the hock, too wide in the beam, and far, far too distended in front. One good woman couldn't see her plate and would have to pull her fork from under to see what its tine had speared. The guests graded from mild exhilaration to pretty dam tight. My hostess' son was pretty well left of center. I had sufficient presence of mind to ask my monitor for dances, far more than could reasonably be expected of a woman so old—probably almost pushing 40. . .
By this time you are asking, "Why all this boring life history from an almost utter stranger?" The answer is simple.
I have never seen, much less occupied, an office chair pushing $300. I must get acclimated to it gradually and by easy stages or else find myself in the same uneasy situation as that of a 16- year-old small town boy at his first metropolitan banquet and ball. . . Respectfully, Durham & Durham, Atty.'s. By Andrew E. Durham
SOUTH IN A BOX CAR, NORTH IN A CADILLAC
Excerpts from an article written by Pap, in the Putnam County
Graphic, June 24, 1954.
Some 35 years ago, a young man born and reared in Putnam County, near Greencastle, decided to seek his fortune elsewhere. Of uncompromising Republican political stock, he ignored Horace Greeley's admonition, "Young man go West," and took a different direction.
He had already arranged to buy on contract a modest acreage in the Mississippi Delta where the silt of countless overflows of the River had produced a soil more than 60 feet in depth—the deepest and richest soil on Earth other than the valley of the Nile. . .
And so, one typically bleak March day, he assembled his dog, a span or two of mules, his scanty farming tools and himself into a box car headed south.
In later years, when speaking of that momentous occasion, he said, "I think the most lonesome, homesick and desperate moment of all my ups and downs was the time I closed that box car door on familiar scenes I might never see again—and the wheels began to turn. It was so cold I made a sort of bunk, wrapped my dog and myself in the same blankets to help keep one another warm, and tried to go to sleep."