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Post being replied to

Boom's a good guy by mkovac

I still remember our photo excursion during Easter vacation in 1970 down into Kentucky and Tennessee.

We stayed overnight at Carol Lectefeld's house in Louisville (SMC, Class of 1970), then proceeded across the state in foul weather into Tennessee, where one night, our money dried up, we slept in some furrows of a frozen cornfield and managed not to contract pneumonia.

We wanted to take some photos up a country lane, and as we started walking off the paved road onto a dirt road, a lady who was in her front yard waved us over and asked us what we were doing with the cameras. We told her that we were college students on vacation and thought we would take some photos "here in Kentucky." We asked her, "Do you think that's ok?"

She said, "Don't mind me none, but those boys up the road might take a shot at you. Might think you're revenuers."

Well, I understood that warning. So did Boom. We thanked her and walked back to the car. Carol told us that if we were going to be driving around in the country, to not be surprised at all the broken down cars parked in front of the the houses. "Yard cars," she called them.

Kentucky is a beautiful state. Green and the scenery changes with every curve in the road.

The previous summer (1969), I had driven my three roommates ("off campus house mates") into rural Kentucky so they could spend part of the summer at Abbey of Gethsemani, the monastery where Thomas Merton lived. He had died the previous December of an accidental electrocution in Bankok, so sadly he was not there in physical form. While driving to the monastery, we got lost. I mean, really lost.

I asked someone at a gas station where Gethsemani was and he told me, "You just keep drivin'. You see the front yards with the Bathtub Marys and you'll know you're close."

"Bathtub Marys?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "The Catholics put a statue of Mary inside a turned up bathtub planted in the ground: Bathtub Marys. You'll see 'em."

We sure did. Quite a sight.

When my roommates got to the monastery, they settled into the daily routine and quite enjoyed it.

While they were there, the monks all gathered together for a vote. There was no television there, but there was a significant event that a number of monks wanted to see, and they wanted to see it at the moment it occurred - the Moon landing.

The vote was taken and the ayes won, so my roommates, Mark, Paul, Bill, and Tom were there, in the refrectory with the monks of the Abbey of Gethsemani when the first humans walked on the moon.

I was in Bakersfield, watching it with my father, his grape broker, and the very lovely blonde Helen Brackley.