When I was 10, my
best friend was Schwinn.
Well, not really.
Schwinn made the bike that got me
to my best friend’s house. I couldn’t wait to pedal 2 miles out the Waycross
Highway to Phelps Dairy.
Joe and I took turns spending the
night at each other’s house. We had to
tiptoe at NeSmith Funeral Home. But when at Phelps Dairy, we could romp and not
worry about raising the dead.
Big Joe’s father founded Phelps
Dairy in Waycross, and his son ran the distribution center in Jesup. My best
friend’s daddy was a man’s man. Today he would be called a Navy SEAL. During
World War II, he was a frogman. He was tough and funny.
I loved to be around Big Joe.
He’d take Joe and me hunting and fishing. And with his playful teasing, he was
a perpetual high-jinks machine. His belly laughs could raise the dead.
Joe was fire-plug stocky. I was
skinny as a yardstick. Joe wanted to lose weight. I wanted to find whatever
pounds he might lose. One day, a light bulb flickered inside my buzz-cut head.
“Mr. Phelps, could I buy some of
that milkshake mix that you sell to the Dairy Queen?”
“Why?”
“I want to gain weight.”
I was convinced that I’d found a
secret formula to bulk up my frame for football. I gulped down a half-gallon of
the rich-in-eggs-and-Lord-knows-what-else concoction. My plumbing thought that
I had swallowed a cherry bomb. I must have lost 5 pounds. I can still hear Big
Joe’s raucous howls.
In the 1950s, Mother brought home
a waxed carton of Brand X milk.
“Oh,
no, we can’t drink that,” I said.
“But it’s all the store had.”
“Mother, please don’t make me
drink that.”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. Phelps said that
drinking Starland milk will make you go blind.”
Under duress, I drank “dangerous”
Savannah milk.
Several years later our junior high
teacher gave us eye tests. When I tried to read the chart, Mrs. Nanelle Bacon screeched,
“Good Lord, son, you are blind. Tell your
mamma to get you some glasses.”
That afternoon, I raced home to report the scary news.
“Mother, I tried to warn you. Remember,
Mr. Phelps told me that drinking Starland milk would make me go blind?”
When I retold that story to Big
Joe, he guffawed so hard that I thought Phelps’ milk was going to squirt out
his nose.
And when he stopped laughing, Big
Joe talked about the time when one of his country-store customers made a special
request.
“Joe, I need your help. The Starland man hasn’t come back to get this
milk that I can’t sell. Will you take it
and dispose of it for me?”
Joe agreed, but that wasn’t the
end of the story.
In
a few days, he bumped into his buddy, the Starland delivery guy. Joe said, “I
took some of your milk and fed it to my hunting dogs.”
“How’d they like it?”
“Oh, it was so awful, my dogs had
to lick their behinds to get the bad taste out of their mouths.”
(Note: Big Joe
died in his 50s from emphysema, probably related to being gassed in World War
II. In 2018 I gave my best friend Joe’s eulogy. His son, Joe III, is one of our
son Alan’s best friends. These days, Joe III’s son, Griffin, is a pre-med
sophomore at the University of Georgia. And when Griffin visits our farm, all
these treasured memories flood my soul. Indeed, people die twice. First the
heart stops. And next, the stories stop. My goal is to keep the stories of my
friends “alive” as long as I live.)
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
