AM I THE ONLY ONE. . . . who occasionally likes to revisit the past.

My sweetie started this blog on September first of 2018. So, we’re coming up on the five-year anniversary. I didn’t post my first item to it until the 20^th of that month. That first article got me started and for a while, I’d post something a couple times a month. Often it was only a poem from one of the books I had written. Occasionally it would be something more memorable, possibly from an article I had written for TCPalm. And sometimes it would be something that I had just then written specifically for this blog.

In honor of that fifth anniversary, I thought it would be interesting to re-post a few of the more interesting or meaningful of those early postings. Today, I’m reposting an article that originally appeared on October 29, 2018. My memory isn’t what it once was and I’m not certain which of those categories this article comes from, but I ran across it the other day and it brought back fond memories from the days of my youth. Hopefully, it will do the same for some of you. Here goes…..

AM I THE ONLY ONE . . . . who has fond memories of my first jackknife?

I don’t rightly recall which birthday it was, but I was really young and I had that jackknife for a good many years. (It was never known as just a knife, always a JACKKNIFE.) I can remember makin homemade slingshots, usin the big blade on that jackknife to do the cuttin. I’d use my jackknife to peel off the bark and whittle them down to size, then you’d leave it out in the sun to dry. While it was dryin, usin the small blade of my jackknife, I’d cut an old inner-tube into strips for the slings. Still using my jackknife, I’d cut apart a pair of old worn-out boots to get leather for the stone carrier.

If they were high-tops and had those big long tongues, one pair of boots would give you enough leather for about 6 sling shots. Not that you’d need that many, cause once ya had one ya liked ya stuck with that one till it wore out. But a good slingshot made a valuable trading item, ya might even be able to trade for another jackknife or maybe a whetstone. If you used your jackknife much, you needed a good whetstone.

I also remember pickin up cigarette butts to tear apart and use the tobacco to roll a cigarette usin the thin pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog for papers. I’d use my jackknife to cut the page to size, but other times I’d smoke them in a homemade corncob pipe.

I’d use the big blade on my jackknife to cut a corncob down to about an inch and a half or two inches then hollow it out usin the small blade of my jack knife. I’d use that jackknife to scrape the outside of the cob to a smoother surface. Then I’d stuff the bottom with some clay from the creek bank. Sometimes, instead of clay, I’d whittle a wooden peg to fill the hole in the bottom of the cob. Then, I’d poke a hole in the side of it with the leather punch on my jackknife then, using the big blade, I’d cut a golden rod stem down to about 5 or 6 inches and poke a piece of haywire through it to make it hollow. It made a nice stem for the corncob pipe. I’d stick that into the hole in the corncob and seal it, once again using clay from the creek bank, or sometimes we’d use Elmer’s glue to keep the stem in place.

I remember ridin my bike 7 or 8 miles to Pleasant Lake and back and occasionally “coonin” melons at “the old log cabin” then usin my jackknife to cut them up. No matter where I went, I always had my jackknife in my right front pocket and a few specially selected stones in the other for use with my slingshot which was always in my right-hand back pocket.

Sometimes I would climb to the top of the maple trees in the back forty. It seemed like you could see for miles from up there. I’d light up my corncob pipe and sit there for hours enjoying the sights. Then I’d use my jackknife to carve my initials as high up in that tree as I could possibly get.

Life sure was a lot different back in the days before color TV, smart phones and You-tube….

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Gramps use’ta say
R.L.King2012 #556