Dale's Tales

It’s almost like there are three Great Walls of China.  One is  for tourists from around the world, including Chinese citizens.  That wall is pictured to the top left.  It is beautiful.  It is magnificent.  It goes on for miles and miles.  The original Great Wall was originally built in the 7th century B.C. to keep out invaders from Mongolia.  It was rebuilt in the 6th Century and again in the 16th Century during the Ming Dynasty.  It had another major renovation in the 1950′s and is well maintained in the area surrounding Beijing.

There’s another area of the Great Wall that begins at the Pacific Ocean.  This section is called “Old Dragon’s Head” and represents the first of many maned outposts along the Great Wall.  This area of China is visited mostly by Chinese natives that want to go to the ocean to swim and vacation.  This area of the wall is not maintained nearly as well as the section around Beijing.  The first half mile is kept in good repair, but beyond that, you would find it overrun with grass and saplings.  This section is pictured center left.

A large portion of the Great Wall of China looks like the section to the lower left.  The stone bricks have fallen and in the farming areas, much of the earth has been carted away by the farmers who need “fresh” soil that has not been robbed of nutrients after decades to centuries of growing crops.  There is really no practical way for the Chinese government to maintain the entire Great Wall.  Any great architectual feat of man will disappear in time.  Fortuately, tourists can still see the wall in a renovated version of its original spendor in the Beijing area.

5.  Superhero.  Even when I was growing up, boys wanted to be superheros.  Superman would have been a good name, but it was already taken.  I chose my superhero name from the character in a movie my mother was watching when I was six or seven.  Vicar.  It just so happened I had a shirt with a design on the front that resembled a giant letter “v”, so that was convenient.  I decided to enhance my name a bit, by adding the work “strong.”  Strong Vicar!  I remember standing in front of a mirror, flexing my arms and watching the area where I would someday have biceps.  It was good to be a superhero!  I announced my new status and name at the dinner table one night.  That’s when I learned that “vicar” was the title given to a man of the Church of England, a lesser title than priest.  Afterward, I was barraged with comments like, “Bless me father, for I have sinned” and “Strong Vicar, would you hear my confession?”  I should have followed Clark Kent’s example and kept my superhero status a secret.

4  The Rake. I was watching a cartoon on TV one day with my family and one of the characters accidentally stepped on the tines of a garden rake.  The wooden stick came up and hit the character in the head and all kinds of funny little images appeared in a word balloon around his head.  My family and I all laughed and laughed.  Sometime after that, I noticed a rake leaning up against the tool shed in our back yard.  I laid it down on the ground and stepped on it.  On purpose!  The wooden handle came up and conked me on the head.  No funny images appeared around my head.  No saw it, so no one laughed.  I decided it wasn’t that funny after all.

3.  Flying. I was about five years old and had never heard of Icarus.  If I had, I might have decided it was foolhardy to try to fly.  Instead of flapping my arms like the wings of a bird, I decided to have fixed wings like a plane.  I somehow managed to work a yardstick through one sleeve of my shirt, across my back and out the other sleeve.  I made it up on a chair for an elevated take-off.  I actually remember the landing more than the take-off.  The problem with fixed wings for a boy is that you can’t put your arms down to break your fall in case something goes wrong in your flight.  Even if my effort wasn’t successful, I did get ice cream afterward from my sympathetic mother.  Hmmm.  Maybe I just needed more altitude?

2.  May Day.  There was a tradition in my home town when I was young celebrating the first day of May.  At school, we would all have paper streamers and interlace them around a pole on the playground.  We would also make May Day baskets.  The tradition was to take your basket, fill it with spring flowers and take it to the house of a girl you liked.  My girl was a 16 year old neighbor.  Too old for a five or six year old, I know, but she gave me a lot of attention and she was very pretty.  The idea was to place your basket in front of the door of your sweetheart, knock and the door and run.  If she saw you and caught you, then you got kissed.  Well, I liked her, but didn’t want to get kissed!  I carefully walked across the street, placed by basket, knocked, and turned around to run.  And there she was!  I think she saw me coming and went out her back door and came around the side of the house to trap me.  I ran, but to no avail.  I got kissed.  Not so silly, you say?  I guess not.  The silly part came later.  I went home, made another basket, picked more violets for the basket, and headed back across the street.  I placed the basket on the porch floor and knocked loudly.  Then I didn’t run, I just waited.  My sweetheart came to the door, looked at me standing there and just laughed.  And I stood there not understanding.

1.  Tar Pies.  When I was growing up, many little girls liked to play in the mud and make “mud pies.”  Maybe they were Julia Child want-to-bes (Rachel Ray want-to-bes for you young folks).  Maybe they just wanted to have a reason to get dirty like the boys.  There’s even a story in my family of my older sisters making mud pies and feeding them to one of my older brothers.  I heard that story many times growing up, so maybe my actions can be explained as wanting retribution for my brother’s humiliation.  Anyway, my little sister was making mud pies once and I gave her an open bucket of black tar.  I told her this would make beautiful, shiny black mud pies.  The most beautiful in the whole world.  She took the bait and started playing in the tar.  I then made myself scarce.  I really don’t remember if I ever got punished for my oneriness that day, but I can tell you I have suffered the consequences for my action for decades.  My sister never forgot.  She also never forgets to remind me of what I did.  It really was NOT worth it.  Anyway, the brother that ate those mud pies probably deserved it!

There are a lot a sculptures in the city of Chongqing, China.  This group of sculptures were just outside a McDonalds in one of the downtown shopping areas.  One of the sculptures in the photo even has a soft drink in one hand, perhaps from McDonalds.  I had my picutre taken but I’m not sure the Chinese onlookers understood my sense of humor and why I might be standing as I was.

Dale’s Almost Better Than Sex Cake

Ingredients:

1              pkg         Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake Mix

1-1/3     cup         Buttermilk

2              tsp          Pure Vanilla Extract

4              tbl           Hershey’s Unsweetened Cocoa Powder; divided

4              large      eggs

½             cup         canola oil

¼             pkg         Heath baking toffee bits

1              sm          Cool Whip topping tub

7              oz           Condensed sweetened milk (do not substitute)

6              oz           Hershey’s caramel ice cream topping (do NOT use caramel apple dip)

1.  Preheat oven for your size pan as per directions on cake mix box.

2.  Grease (or use cooking spray) your cooking pan.

3.  Lightly dust bottom and pan sides with 1 tbl of Hershey’s Cocoa Powder

4.  Combine cake mix, buttermilk, vanilla, remaining cocoa powder, eggs, and oil in a mixing bowl and blend together by hand until ingredients are moist.

5.  Mix ingredients with hand mixer for about one minute, until fully blended.

6.  Bake according to box directions for your size pan, but check five minutes early with toothpick in center of cake.  When toothpick comes out clean, remove from the oven.  DO NOT OVERBAKE.

7.  Place cake on cooling rack and set timer for 5 minutes.

8.  In a small sauce pan, heat condensed milk and caramel ice cream topping on low heat to thin.

9.  After 5 minutes, cut slits in the top of the cake horizontally and vertically about 2” apart, but DO NOT cut all the way to the bottom of the cake.

10. Pour caramel/milk blend over the cake, letting it seep into the slits and around the edges.

11. Sprinkle Heath toffee bits across the top of the cake and let it cool completely.

12. Serve with Cool Whip topping, amount as desired.  If the cake will be eaten in one setting, you can spread topping over cake and sprinkle additional Heath bits on top.

I was a town kid.  There really weren’t many of us and I didn’t understand why when I was growing up.  I knew my town was small, around 300 or so souls.  I only knew it was small because I had an older sister who lived in Des Moines and I would spend a week there during the summer.   Small as my town may have been, it swelled in population every Wednesday and Saturday nights.  Those are the nights the farmers would come to town to trade.  Mainly to buy supplies, such as feed, hardware, groceries and the like, but also to socialize.  When I was 8 years old, my parents and my oldest brother bought the town drug store owned by M.L. Jones.  Jones was a pharmacist and my father and brother were not, so it became Houck’s General Store.  I’m not sure such a thing as doctor’s prescriptions existed at the time, but if they did, any of those medicines were destroyed and replaced with items you would find in the five and dimes of the era.  The closest five and dime was the Ben Franklin Store about ten miles south of us, so we filled a niche for the local community with our store.

The former owner had a soda fountain, counter, booths, tables and the like that you found in many drug stores of the day.  When my family took over, the soda fountain gave way to the new fangled soft drinks in bottles (called “pop” in that area), but the booths and tables remained.  What was added was a juke box, a pinball machine and room to dance.  The store became quite the hangout after school each day and especially on Wednesday and Saturday nights.  The high school boys and girls would come in, drink pop and dance up a storm.  I was eight years old; too young to dance, but not too young to dream about the day that I would.  The girls often wore what are now known as poodle skirts, usually with a tight blouse or sweater.  Presley was big at the time.  So was Buddy Holly, a country singer named Johnny Horton, Roy Orbinson, Del Shannon and their contemporaries.  This was pre-Beetles by about five years  or so and it was an exciting time.

Before acquiring the drug store, I had lived only two blocks from downtown, but being the age I was, I never knew what a magical place it was on Wednesday and Saturday nights.  I had never been “downtown” except during the day, when I would sometimes go and purchase six very large candy bars for a quarter.  Five cents each, or six for a quarter.  What a deal!  Small bottles of pop were seven cents, large ones were a dime.  Cigarettes were a quarter.  I don’t know how much beer was, because at the time, you couldn’t buy it in my home town.

What a new world had opened up for me!  I went from being home every night to having the run of the town, so to speak.  Yes, I know it was a small town, impossible to get lost in, even for an eight year old.  But I remember feeling pretty big about myself anyway.  My parents were too busy waiting on customers to know exactly what I was doing, but for the most part, I wasn’t doing anything that they would have been concerned about.  In a small town where everybody knew everybody, you couldn’t venture too far out of line without it coming back to haunt you.  I have some stories about those times, but initially, I was pretty much in awe of life on Main Street.

When I wasn’t watching the guys spinning the girls to the beat of the latest rock tune inside, I was outside.  There was a vacant lot just south of our store, across the street that used to be a railway right-of-way from a time when our town was even more bustling.  I didn’t know those times, but I heard the old timers talk about them.  The town used to have a bank, a hotel, railway station, lumber yard and much more.    The vacant lot became a playground for a game of tag called “Blackman.”  We learned to play Blackman at school and played it at every recess.  I was many, many years older before it ever occurred to me the name of the game was a racial slur of sorts.  Our town was 100% white, always had been and still is.  The game was a very simple game of tag.  Someone was “it” and located in the center.  There was an area on two opposite ends that were a safe base.  You tried to run through the center to the safety of the other side.  Once you were tagged, you were also “it” until no one was left.

After the games, we might wander in and out of the stores.  There was another general store, a barber shop, two grocery stores, two gas stations, a creamery, a used furniture store, a garage to have your car repaired, a pool hall and a post office.  That was it.  I didn’t go into the pool hall at first, it was too intimidating.  Everything else, including just walking the streets within a few blocks of Main Street was fair game.  The young farm boys in town would talk about what tractor was best:  John Deere, Massey-Feguson, Ford, etc.   They knew all the “model numbers” associated with the tractors, and I didn’t.  I would join in anyway, making up a number and expound upon the benefits of that model.  It worked for awhile and then it didn’t anymore.  It didn’t matter anyway, they just let me chime in when I felt the need.

Sometimes girls our age would play Blackman with us, but never joined us in the explorations of the town.  They would sit in cars, sometimes with each other, sometimes with their mother while she waited for her farmer husband to quit talking and take them home.  As the kids in town got older, they would become the ones dancing in our general store or, for the boys, going to the pool hall.  Growing up, I never saw a single female in the pool hall until the day the proprietor’s mother came to town.  She was shocked and appalled at what she saw and immediately shut the place down.  It reopened a few weeks later in a different building and a whole new level of cleanliness.

Sometime between 10 and 11 PM, the farmers would slowly finish their business in town and the population would return to its normal size.  Those days are long gone now.  The final death knoll for my hometown ended up being what people thought would help it prosper:  the Interstate Highway and an exchange for the town.  Instead of helping make it easier for people from other areas to come to town, it made it easier for everyone in town to go north or south to a larger town to conduct business.  The last I knew, the only “business” left was the post office.  Even it is now housed in a modular single wide trailer.  Perhaps even the post office has a hitch on one end, ready to be towed away, leaving nothing but the cemetery and forgotten memories of the town’s  past glory.  But for me, there was ten years of life on Main Street, with many memories.  Some of those memories won’t be told.  Not by me anyway, unless I write them in sand at the water’s edge.  But many I can and will tell.

We never knew when the war would begin, but we knew it would.  It happened every year.  We never knew who started it each year, unless you happened to be the one who started it.  The wars weren’t very bloody as far as wars go, but that’s not to say they were without pain.  Usually, there would be a group of boys standing on Main Street talking.  Bragging.  Telling tales.  Then, without warning, there would be a thud.  Sometimes, if we were lucky, the thud would be at our feet.  Sometimes it would be the sound of a walnut-to-plum sized apple bouncing off the head of one of the boys in the group.  In a fraction of a second, we knew; the Green Apple Wars had begun for the year.

The first missile would come as a surprise, so no one would know where it came from.  Everyone would scatter to protect ourselves from another volley, which usually didn’t come.  The culprit was most likely one person who had just tempted fate with half a dozen or so guys, so they didn’t want to be chased down and be fed a shattered apple.  So, they would disappear.  We would spread out trying to get a glimpse of someone running away, but I never remember anyone ever being caught for starting the war.  It was exciting really.  The wars were fun.  There wasn’t a whole lot to do in a small town of 300 or so people, so why not play war games?  After all, paintball was decades away from being invented.

After the initial surprise of that first green apple, everyone headed for the Boatmen’s apple orchard, climbing and shaking trees and gathering an arsenal for battles that would ensue over the next two or three weeks.  You couldn’t let the apples get too big, or the war might have unintended casualties.  Pain wasn’t the object of the game, the object was fun.  OK, maybe part of the object was a little bit of pain, but you wanted it to be someone else’s, not yours.

There were never “sides” in the green apple wars.  Not permanent type alliances anyway.  Sometimes there would be some collusion, but that rarely lasted more than a portion of the night.  Usually, it was every guy for themselves.  The whole object was to keep from accumulating painful welts on your body while not being that concerned about welts on anyone else.  In fact, you had to cause some of those welts, or you just weren’t a part of the war.

There were the obligatory word games that accompanied the physical aspects of the green apple wars.  Maybe you were the one who covertly connected an apple from your arsenal with the noggin of one of the Reed boys.  It only made sense that you would show yourself a few minutes later, acting innocent and commenting to the injured party, “What in the world got into Gene Hatfield?  He just about ran me over when I was coming out of the store to get some milk for my mother just now!”    Funny how Gene Hatfield would end up with a black eye not long after that.  But, you have to understand, Gene was a bully.  It didn’t make anyone lose sleep if he happened to be on the other end of fist once in awhile.

The buildings on Main Street were all single story except for my parents general store.  One time Jimmy Lee decided to participate in the war and got on top of the pool hall.  It was really out of character for Jimmy anyway, so I guess you couldn’t be too surprised that he would fire a volley from a spot where it was impossible to escape.  And, he never should have laughed after he hit Kenny G. (no, not the saxophonist).  Kenny ran over to the pool hall, jumped up on the fuel oil tank, and up on the roof before Jimmy knew what was happening.  Kenny was back down a minute later with Jimmy’s pants in his hand.  He didn’t hurt Jimmy.  He just took his pants, went out into the middle of Main Street and lit them on fire.  Someone went into my parents store and told Jimmy’s father, Jack, what had happened.  Jack continued to do his visiting and trading, and finally rescued Jimmy from the rooftop more than two hours later.  Jimmy never participated in the Green Apple Wars after that year.

Maybe it was because the apples were getting too big, maybe it was from boredom, but for whatever reason, the wars would always end suddenly.  No losers really (except maybe for Gene Hatfield and Jimmy Lee).  The war had a lot of winners.  A town full of kids with time on their hands, and needing some excitement were the winners.  If you happened to have a few more welts than you expected, there would always be the next year, when the Green Apple Wars would begin again.

Hong Kong is much bigger than I thougt it would be.  It’s very crowded with around 8 million people, but there’s still a lot of vacant land, especially in the area they call the New Territories.  This picture was taken in a beautiful park on the Kowloon Peninsula, just across Victoria Harbour from Hong Kong Island.  We stayed on Hong Kong Island our first time in HK and on the Kowloon Peninsula the second time.  OK, the picture is obviously staged.  But I wanted it to look like I was the fountain.  Instead, I just look really thirsty!

Well, I saw this guy named Chi Ke Ti, I was in China and he had a chicken.

I sent my kids an email with just that message, but only one of them got the allusion to the Barenaked Ladies song, “One Week.”  The man wasn’t too sure about having his picture taken.  He was waiting at a bus stop and we ended up getting on the same bus.  You generally don’t see chickens riding the bus in America, but apparently it isn’t that unusual in China.  My fare for the bus ride was one Yuan (about 15 cents).  I wonder if the chickens had to pay?

There was a flagpole across the street from my parent’s general store when I was growing up.  I was very familiar with this flagpole, because I had convinced the town council to hire me to raise the flag every moring and lower it every evening.  For my labors, I would recieve compensation of $3 per month.  That’s roughly five cents every morning to hang the flay and another nickel in the evening to take it down, fold it properly and take it back across the street to the store.  One Saturday night, there was a problem with the pulley and rope system and I couldn’t lower the flag.  Not a problem for an experienced tree climber like myself, so I shimmied up the pole to free the mechanism.  Well, Saturday night was a farmer trade night in my home town.  Normally in the evening, there might be a handful of cars parked along Main Street.  On Saturday night, there were dozens.  Sitting in one of those cars was a young girl named Judy who I was sweet on (unbenownst to her).  She got out of the back seat of the car and watched me.  Well, I was a proud young man when I had solved the problem at hand and skimmied back down the flag pole.  She had to be impressed, right?  Many Saturday nights after that, I found myself climbing up the flagpole.  Not to free tangled rope or a stubborn pully, but just to catch the attention of my speical friend.  When she was in the car, she would get out of the car and watch, most likely amazed at my abilities.  Several years later, when I had my eye on a new girl in town, my stunts came up in a conversation with Judy.  It seems that first night she saw me climbing the flag pole, her mother was in the front seat.  She commented “that fool is going to fall and break his neck!”  Hearing the comment, Judy got out and watched.  All those times, she didn’t watch to be amazed at my feat.  She watched because she didn’t want to miss seeing me fall when it happened.