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Rummaging in the barn, I stared
at a hunk of rusty steel. I hadn’t
thought about that anvil for 20 years.
Reaching down, I grabbed ahold to lift it up onto a bench.
Whoa, that thing was heavy.
Maybe it was
heavier than in the summer of 1961.
When I was 12,
I worked for Pope’s Texaco on U.S. 301 North, across from the Jesup City
Cemetery. For my 50th
birthday, Mother gave me a restored 1948-era Texaco pump and my starched
filling-station uniform, with my name stitched in red above the pocket of the
olive-drab shirt. Even though I walk
past the vintage pump in the hallway of my office, I hadn’t thought about the
anvil in a long time. The two are
related.
Earning a
quarter an hour, I wasn’t getting rich working for W.O. and Cora Pope. But the wealth of business-sense knowledge
and confidence that I gained that summer can’t be measured in money. Here’s what that hunk of steel had to do with
my education.
Next door to
Pope’s was Georgia Memorials, which sold granite graveyard monuments. Elbert County stone was trucked in to be
sandblasted with inscriptions and installed across Southeast Georgia. The company also made concrete burial
vaults. It was a good funeral-home sideline
for Big Dink and his partner, Bob Harrison.
When I wasn’t waiting
on customers, cleaning bathrooms, changing tires, sweeping the concrete or
washing cars, I’d walk over to the monument-vault shop to visit with Charles
Corbett, ace sandblaster and grave digger.
As I was talking to him, I spied an anvil and tried to pick it up. Seeing my neck veins bulge, Charles chuckled.
Whoa, that thing was heavy.
And there a
challenge was born. Charles had every right to laugh. I was a wormy-looking
kid, with the physique of a skinny pencil.
But I was determined to hoist that thing over my head. A chorus of
disbelievers jeered, “Nooooooo way!”
My goal did
seem ridiculous. After all, I could
barely slide the anvil around in the dirt.
Nonetheless, I had two believers to support my quest. One person gave me hope. Another gave me a way.
1.
My mother had repeatedly told me the mustard-seed
story. She’d open her Bible and read
Matthew 17:20 : “I tell you the truth, if
you have the faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain,
‘Move from here to there’ and it will move.
Nothing will be impossible for you.”
2. Earl
Thornton, my gas-station buddy, was a believer, too. Earl convinced me that if I worked hard
enough—even with muscles as tiny as a mustard seed—I could pick up that
“mountain” of steel. With two empty
paint cans, a piece of galvanized water pipe and cement from the vault plant, Earl
made a set of barbells. All summer, I
pumped that homemade concrete “iron.” Before
I went back to school, Earl bet Charles that I could lift the anvil over my
head. This time, Earl did the laughing as I pumped the metal skyward not once
but twice. I can still taste the icy Coke
to celebrate.
Margaret Thatcher,
the former prime minister of Great Britain, once said, “You may have to fight a battle more
than once to win it.”
With that in
mind—during my barn rummaging—I decided to see whether I could win the anvil
challenge again.
Whoa, that thing is heavy.
I wish Earl was
still here. He’d make me another set of concrete
barbells.
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dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
