A 1972 photo

Steven and David.  What is the fist-in-the-pocket thing?  A sign of passive-aggressive tendencies?  This may have been Easter.  That's likely  because my dad was not prone to take a lot of photos, and only took a few even on special occasions.  (Note added on 15 July 2014: nope, not Easter.  See Easter '72 photo posted on July 15.)

Early May 1974

On May 1st, 1974, I left Pine Bluff headed for New Orleans with Marshall Miller and Karen Jo Simmons.  We were in Karen's car, a white 1962 Plymouth Valiant with push-button transmission located on the dashboard.  We spent the first night sleeping as well as we could in the car and on the ground in a farmer's field in Mississippi.  It was an unpleasant night, mainly because of all the dang mosquitoes but also because of our uncomfortable sleeping arrangement.  We did have sleeping bags, but they aren't so great in the heat. We got on the road early the next morning, with help from the farmer who owned the field.  He spotted us from the highway and came over and ran us off.  He didn't point a gun at us, but he wasn't polite about it either, maybe because we looked like hippies.

Here's a photo--the only one I can find from that trip--taken with Pat Calkins' camera that I still had in my possession from my Costa Rica trip in April.  I was walking back to the car from taking a pee somewhere in lower Arkansas or in western Mississippi.  I'm wearing Stereo Warehouse T-shirt.  The photo has gotten a bit scratched in 40 years, especially right on top of my nose:

I'm not sure if it was in Vicksburg or Natchez that we ate breakfast, but I remember it was in an old downtown hotel, and it was a very enjoyable breakfast.  We drove on to New Orleans from there.  That was the third time I'd been or maybe the fourth in less than a year.  I was reading or started reading The Hobbit on that trip.  That may have even been the most enjoyable part of the trip for me.  At the time, I was living in the riverhouse so I was being something of a hobbit myself.   Marshall, Karen and I met and befriended a couple of musicians, a male and female, who were playing in a bar maybe in the French Quarter, maybe elsewhere.  I recall enjoying the coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, and having my first oyster po'boy at some little roadside restaurant.  Hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's were of course part of the trip.  Scott Sherman came down from Pine Bluff and joined us.  We were staying at some campground near Lake Pontchartrain, and I guess we had a couple of small tents.  Marshall and Karen were a couple at the time.  On the way back, I rode with Scott, and Marshall and Karen were supposed to be following in her car.  Somehow we got separated.  No cell phones back then.  Karen's car had broken down in Hammond from a bad wheel bearing, and they didn't have the money to fix it, so they hitch-hiked back to Pine Bluff, if I remember correctly.  Later, either Scott and I or Marshall and I drove down in Scott's car and picked up Karen's car, after it had been fixed.  I drove Scott's car, a '73 Malibu, back in an overnight drive that I barely managed to stay awake on. I believe the female musician we met and also saw a few years later at a club in Little Rock was Crow Johnson.

Trip

I'm posting this on April 30th, but I'm putting an April 28th date on it, because that was--would have been--Trip Martin's 60th birthday.  Do you still say it's so-and-so's birthday if the person is already dead? I'll just say it was the 60th anniversary of Trip's birth.  He died in January of 1993, supposedly by shooting himself while lying in bed in his apartment in McGehee, Arkansas, where he'd been employed by the Arkansas Highway Department for about 15 years, after graduating with an English degree from Arkansas College (now Lyon College) in Batesville.  Someone else may have shot him and made it look like a suicide.  But I won't delve into that suspicion of mine here, or into the drinking and other problems Trip was having at the time he died. I'll just post a couple of photos from my 10th birthday with the fair-haired and geeky-looking Trip next to me on my right.  Actually, Trip could be quite an insistent pest at times.  He was more complex than just the nice, delicate child that most people assumed him to be.  We were best friends at this time and up until junior high, when Pat Calkins and I became best friends.

Group photo at farm summer of '63

Left to right: Sonny Vammen, Greg, Pat Danaher, David Vammen, Steven, Lynne, Jeff, and me.  The Vammen brothers, from Texarkana, are Lynne's first cousins on her mother's side.  The Danahers had a farm near ours.  Pat's older brother Jim still lives in the farmhouse and farms the land.  Pat died at a young age, about 30, of a heart attack or similar sudden fatal ailment.  The surrey with the fringe on top belonged to Jeff.

A few other Christmas '63 photos

Here's that other photo I mentioned being taken at the same time as the one in my previous post.  Daddy had his film developed as slides.  I recently bought an Epson V370 scanner so I could scan some of his slides.  I've done those from 1963 and '64, so far.  There was a big snow sometime in December of '63 before Christmas,

and here's one more slide from Christmas of me, Steven, Jeff and Greg, the living room rug, the parquet floor, the piano, and some of our presents.  And our matching pajamas:

It's snowing heavily in Pine Bluff right now, which is how I'm able to take a few minutes to post these photos.  No customers at the Recycling Center yet.

Trulock Brothers Christmas 1963, NaNa, Zeke

Our last Christmas at the farm.  Arch was born on October 23rd of that year.  Apparently, another person (probably our dad) was taking a picture from the left (your left).  This one was taken by our maternal grandmother, Elner King Miller.  We called her NaNa, pronounced Na-Naw.  That's her in the picture below, visiting Hawaii in 1973. The date, not quite visible in the top right corner, is June 6, 1973.  That's exactly one year after the sudden death (stroke or heart attack) of my paternal grandmother, Frances Andrews Trulock.  We called her MiMi. 

 

 

And this is Steven's dog Zeke (1974-1986) wearing a pair of Mother's rose-colored glasses in the yard at the River House, probably in 1980 or 81.  Steven brought Zeke back from a trip to Florida he made after he graduated from high school in 1974.  Apparently Marc Cronin and Buddy Brown, also native Pine Bluffians, were in Florida at that time, too, since they later came back to Arkansas with Zeke's brothers, Strider and Prince.  Steven hitchhiked back from Florida sometime in June of '74 (when I was taking the physics class at UALR) with his new puppy.

Cactus Vick card and Costa Rica photo 1974

Sometime in '73 or '74, I got my official Cactus Vick Square Shooters' card.  I was about 19 at the time, hanging out with Mike Oldner and James Pascale, among others.  I don't recall the circumstances of obtaining the card.  Cactus Vick  may have had his little kids' carnival thing at Jefferson Square in Pine Bluff, and I picked up the card there.  Or maybe I ordered it through the mail, which would be something I'd have done as a gotta-be-clever 19-yr-old. My sense of humor hasn't changed much since then.

In April of '74 I went to Costa Rica with my father and his friend Joe Hardin, from Grady.  Daddy and some other Arkansas guys invested in a farm in Costa Rica and tried to grow rice instead of bananas.  It enabled Dad to go to Costa Rica about once a year for 6 or 8 years.  Even after the rice farming didn't work out and the investors sold the land, Dad still went down there a few more times just on pleasure trips.  I got to go with him in '74.  We three gringos spent three nights (with 4 Costa Ricans) in a cabin on the square-mile uninhabited Cano Island, now a nature preserve where overnight stays are not permitted. (I think the Ranger Station is at the location of the former cabin.) I hope to return to Cano and go snorkeling next April, the 40th anniversary of our trip.  The photo below was taken at the home of one of Dad's Costa Rican friends near San Jose.  Joe Hardin is the man in the cap.  He ran against Orval Faubus for governor once, and has a lock & dam named after him.