Monty Payne telephoned one evening last spring to say that he had just read our column about Margaret and Joe Hardaway and their country store near Michigan City.
He went on to say that he didn't know the principals in the article but the thing which interested him about it was a lapse of memory on Old Stuff's part. For we had been wrong in saying that the Lee Guard had become Kappa Sigma when the Greek letter fraternities came into being at State College. It had been Kappa Alpha instead.
Now most folks, in calling out the errors of omission and commission by the fourth estate, do so aggressively, gloatingly, sarcastically or otherwise unpleasantly. But not good K. A. Monty Payne. He was so tactful that we think the State Department is missing a good bet in not lifting him out of Forestry and putting him at the head of the diplomatic corps. For Monty made us feel as if the wonder of wanders had finally occurred, namely that we, at long last, were mistaken about something.
Of course, Old Stuff knows he ain’t that good, and so does Monty, but kind treatment, especially when one has been found wanting is never forgotten.
So Monty Payne will be amused when we tell how the old, memory has slipped again. Not long after Jane Carter and Jolm Swann's wedding, we wrote several paragraphs about Opelika, Alabama, the young lieutenant's hometown. We mentioned some pleasant folks we had once known, the Shealys and Samfords, who lived there. We clipped a couple of those columns and mailed them to our old friends in Opelika. Only we spelled Shealy with two Es and without the A, and listed the first name as Lynwood, when it should have been Crawford instead.
We are conscious of these two glaring errors only because of the card which came today from Sugar and Spook Shealy They didn't fuss at us either, but seemed pleased to be remembered even if their surname had been spelled wrong and the given name was a mile wide of the mark.
Now where and how did we take such a wrong turn? Were we thinking about the great sheet music, house, Lynn-Sheely, which we wrote that column? Or did we call Lurline Tarbert Shealy's husband Lynwood while wandering about in a fog, so to speak, with our subconscious failing to remind us that it is Lurline Stovall Mann whose other half's first name is Lynwood. After all, the Manns were standing by that morning in the circuit clerk's office, when Judge Billy Meggett gave us the marriage license. Next afternoon the newly-wed Crumps were cruisin' down the river in company with the Shealys, Samfords, and many others on their way to the Caribbean Sea.
Anyhow we are glad to get straightened out in this last bit of fuzzy-mindedness where the Crawford Shealys are concerned. And, in the straightening-out process, Lurline ("Sugar") Shealy sent us a picture of her and Spook's very attractive home, "Terrace Wood", a white clapboard house that is literally banked in azalea hushes.
And Major-General A.G. Paxton, just back from central Alabama himself, is probably saying that we had better be hunting another elephant, with a view to swapping memories with same.
If we fail to get a stand of St. Augustine grass beneath the backyard pecan tree this time.
it won't be Inez or Cash Register's fault. For they have really been generous with the runners and cuttings from their place on Ridge Avenue. All the cuttings and runners have generous root systems, too and Cash says that the last tubful which Inez gave us contained a lot more St. Augustine than he himself had in the beginning. The trick, say the Registers, is to keep the transplantings well wet-down, so we will check out now, and start the sprinkler.
-BC..
