While Tearing Off a Game of Golf, I May Make a Play for the Caddy.....

Today would have been my father's 100th birthday. I'm trying to think of what it must have been like 100 years ago today in Blacksburg. Beautiful. Cold. Happy. He grew up the tallest and handsomest, according to my 90-year-old cousin, and youngest of the siblings, a very big fish in a very small town. I think it was either he or Uncle Laudy who told me of watching Daddy do flips around the experimental apple orchard behind their house on the Virginia Tech campus -- from top to top of the trees, bending them down to the ground and pole vaulting up to the top of the next tree. He and my mother are the two most courageous people I have ever met.

Unpacking our books, once again, as we did for the first time in my life in 1959, has revealed yet more of his character to me, or that of his family.

There's an original copy of Lost Horizon dedicated by the woman I call Aunt Idelette to the one I call Aunt Cherie. To Bob from Bill.

I also unearthed Idelette/Bill's obituary in the Salem, Va., paper. It noted her becoming a devoted Trekkie in her last years -- that Dr. Spock haircut she got in 1920 proved to be her destiny.

How he loved ice skating.

I found what just might be Uncle Laudy's original Boy Scout handbook -- Grandmother Juice having founded the first Boy Scout troop in Blacksburg in 1915, to keep Laudy out of trouble. As he was a Presbyterian minister for like 75 years I guess it worked.

Not for Daddy. Happy birthday, Daddy.