Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I’m Pink Lady Apple Yeggs and my friend, and brother-in-law, Deviled Yeggs suggested that I record each project that I set up in the hopes of reforming the people who continue to work for Lily the Pink Enterprises.  If for no other reason, it would show how God is at work.

Julia was keeping an eye out for people who wanted to visit for my open-door policy.  Security rotated that duty since I did not think I needed a receptionist, but in a way, the security force acted in the role.

I buzzed her, “Julia, I apologize.  I took the children to the nursery for the day, and I am just getting back into the office.  I am ready to start the open-door period.  Do we have a line forming?”

“Nope,” Julia replied. “Just the one.  I’ll send him in.”

My heart skipped a beat.  Julia said “him” and I had rarely had a man at my open-door (habitually kept closed to keep Kanok from wandering), and then if a man was here it was mostly as one half of a couple.  I bowed my head.  Who could this be?  Jim Kaiser has Griffin Grunge, Kevin Johnson, Blake Williams and Darrell Driver working for him.  I saw Cole Dalton up in the African exotics area as I walked through the Crystal Mountain.  Could it be a mission person?

When I looked up, it was GrandPa, Millenium Yeggs.

I snorted, “GrandPa, you are family.  We can talk anytime.  What do I owe this pleasure?”

GrandPa said, “I don’t know if this is much of a pleasure.  I don’t know how this is supposed to work.  Bless me, Mommie Pinkie, for I have sinned.”

I coughed, “No, that is not at all the way to start.  I am not a priest.  This is not a confessional.  In spite of a Catholic monk, prior of the local monastery at the time, giving me a Bible, I have not been influenced by the Catholic way of doing anything.  There is no set way of doing things.  You come in and talk.”

He nodded, “I have been wanting to get this off my chest for a long time, but looking at you now, I wonder if I should not have gone after you all those years ago.  You are quite lovely.”

I again coughed, “GrandPa!  For one, I was not a prostitute, and you were in the mode of rescuing sex workers.  For another, you should be ashamed of yourself.  Gwen is a lovely woman.  She is becoming a wonderful mother and a great company president.  And you, who stayed true to your wife who had been dead for roughly 70 years?  Why look upon anyone other than your wife with desire.”

He shrugged, “That is part of why I came here.  I need to set the record straight.  But frankly, I have no idea why God loves me.  I do not doubt my salvation, but why?  I have made such a mess of things.”

I nodded, “Sure, you were a professional safe cracker and thief, extraordinaire.  But my father, PawPaw, has made peace with his past life, and he killed people for a living.  God forgives you because He is a God of love.”

GrandPa shook his head, “Ash accepting Jesus and me.  That’s why I have gotten in this funk lately.  Ash became a Christian and he suddenly quit beating people up.  He never killed anyone anymore.  Me?  I accepted Jesus long enough ago to be a full lifetime, but I kept my old job.  I did not change.  I accepted Jesus when I made my second rescue, Mildred Peal.  As Gwen called her, the other Millie.  She led me to Jesus a long time ago.  Why did I keep working for the government, doing bad things?”

I sighed, “GrandPa.  It wasn’t all bad.  And I cannot answer to why you kept stealing things.  You have never really kept anything for your use.  You have given it away to help the ladies that you rescued.  You are a modern day Robin Hood.”

GrandPa said, “But I continued to sin against God.  I kept making excuses.  I had started the rescue process.  Of course, the first Hugh McAdoo that I worked for enlisted the rescued women to pass along seemingly innocuous observations, but when you added their information with what spies were saying and the spy satellites could tell you, you had actionable intelligence.  Wars may have been averted.  Lives may have been saved, but it started by me breaking into someone’s safe.  And the sad thing is I really enjoy keeping my skills up.”  He lifted a file folder and threw it on my desk.  “By the way, here is your truck list, for when you and a few managers get run over by a truck.  I doubt if I would change anything, but showing you the list and seeing the dumbfounded look on your face proves to me that I still have that touch.  But wouldn’t the Holy Spirit teach me to hate that part of me?”

I huffed, “Thanks for returning something that I did not know was missing, but instead of being a prankster, maybe God has given you those skills to do something good with them.  Have you enjoyed working in the Rogue’s Gallery?”

GrandPa laughed, “You keep forgetting that I came up with the name, but yes, I enjoy that.  I get to think of how I would do in the hostage situation or as the rescuer of the hostage.  Those ideas directly come from my experience.  Another reason why my granddaughter, the one I am gazing at right now, in-law or not, is very wise.  But am I really a child of God?”

I smiled, “You have the fruits of the Spirit, GrandPa.  You show love to those around you.  When you worked, you submitted to your boss, whichever Hugh McAdoo it was, rightly or wrongly, but being submissive works in your favor.  Yes, you should have not sinned, but God will take all of that into account, including the greater good.  Anything else, or do you want to throw a few more compliments my way?”

GrandPa sighed, “You said that my Ada was my one and only.  I have to correct that.  And I have to commend you, or the Holy Spirit working through you.  I was seduced by something evil in high school, an evil produced by having too much money and too little moral guidance.  The seduction led me to my Ada, the first love of my life, but it was very rocky.  You have the money, but you use it for good.  Seeing how you work with your employees nearly brings tears to my eyes.  You show love for them every day.”

I waved a hand, “Keep the compliments coming.  Grannie Fannie was sick this morning, a stomach bug, I think.  PawPaw decided that he could take care of the children easier in the nursery.  And for some strange reason, no one who is an employee or a mission person needs to talk today.  So, I feel less of a mother and a little down, but I also have time on my hands.  I might need a boost, but how was Ada not your one and only?  You deflected the admiration of all your rescued ladies, except Gwen, because you loved your first wife so much, although she died soon after Thou was born.  Who is this mystery lady, and when did she enter your life?”

GrandPa groaned, “Let’s call her the mystery girl, and we grew up in the same school district.  What brought this all back to the surface was the stories about the puppy love between Arabella Dalton and Michael Rowe Casey.  Michael is new to the school and Arabella was new a year or two ago.  Arabella’s wild stories that happened to be true scared most friends away, and Michael came in not knowing anyone.  Then the teacher set the desks up in alphabetical order.  Arabella told me that there is a boy named Amundsen, a girl named Barker, then Michael and then her, and then another girl named Ferguson in the row next to the window.  All this year, Michael will have Arabella behind him in more than one way.  Arabella loves to talk.  I love to listen and laugh.  It has been a healthy combination, but it has dredged up horrible memories.  Yet, some sweet memories also.”

He paused to wipe away a tear.  “The desks were bolted down in my day.  It was near the end of World War II.  I was a junior in high school, and as usual, with assigned seats, I was at the end of the last row of desks from front to back, closest to the hallway.  We had no Zimmerman nor Zapata.  I was last to get my diploma also.  We also had no Xavier nor Xiao.  So, the girl in front of me was one of the richest girls in Tracy at the time, Yolanda Worthington.”

I asked, “I have never heard of any Worthingtons.  Who were they?”

GrandPa smiled, “They and the Waldorfs thought they owned Tracy back eighty years ago.  But fate was not kind to either family.”

I shrugged, “Buddy Waldorf Avenue is near the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial.  Is that connected to your story?”

GrandPa nodded, “I will get to what happened to everyone at the end.”  GrandPa looked at the floor for about 10 seconds.  “You know that my father and grandfather taught me how to crack any safe in the world by the time I was ten.  Picking locks was child’s play.  Sneaking past security alarms was a challenge that I loved to do.  When I was a junior in high school, I could and did get into any and every room on campus.  I never got caught.  Well, early that semester, Yolanda turned to me and said, ‘Meet me at the arch.’  And then she left.  This was after the last period.  I walked home, so it didn’t matter if I took a detour.  The ‘arch’ was a niche underneath the second story fire escape.  It is where those kids trying to hide from the bullies gathered.  It is where the smokers gathered, in those days tobacco.  So, everyone knew it as the ‘arch’.  She was there when I arrived.  She said that she needed to pass the test for first period, and she knew where the teacher kept the test that he used.  She would make it worth my while, if I somehow copied the test.  The test was mimeographed.  No copiers in those days.  I could not steal the test.  I had to read the questions, give a keyword to recognize that question and then I wrote the exact answer that the teacher was looking for.  While I was at it, I made a copy for myself, but I knew to not have Yolanda’s exact answers since she was in front of me in class.  During the year, I got the distinct impression that someone else, a servant of the Worthingtons, was also getting the answers, but half of the answers were wrong.  I will come back to that later.”

GrandPa continued, “Yolanda had told me to come to the servant entrance at her home so that no one saw me enter the front door.  She also specified the time the next day.  She met me at the door and escorted me to her bedroom.  She went to her desk to review what I had done.  She made no eye contact with me, but she smiled and nodded.  She turned on her radio.  Not everyone had radios, but I had seen a few in the Worthington home on our way through the servant pathways.  She started swaying her hips to the music, Tommy Dorsey as I remember, with some blue-eyed singer, let me think, what was his name?  Sinatra!  That’s it!  She then started to strip.  At this point, I saw her look at me eye to eye.  There was something yearning in her eyes, and she was determined.  She knew what she wanted, and she was determined to get it.  When she had completely undressed, loving the effect it had on me, she walked over close enough for me to smell her expensive perfume.  She did not have a skinny body of the modern models.  She was full figured, I guess you might say.  If I had seen her ten years later, I would say a centerfold body, but those did not exist in late 1943.  Frankly, with her right in front of me all those years, ever since fourth grade, I never noticed her feminine development, but naked before me, I saw, and I desired.  She then shocked me.  She said, ‘We can’t go any further until you get undressed, Millie with the big Willy.’”

I snorted and then started laughing.

GrandPa sneered, “And now you know why calling me Millie without my permission is like raising a red flag.  It’s why my own grandson got two black eyes and a broken nose.  I apologized to Deviled.  I was a little slow getting free of the double shackles, and he got hit with chains instead of fists.  But come to think of it, I might let the wives of my children and grandchildren call me Millie.”

I reached for a tissue; the laughter had my sinuses messed up.  I waved a hand.  “Now that I know what it really means, I doubt if I could call you that with a straight face, GrandPa.  Do Gwen, Mary Tozer, and Pauline know the true meaning of Millie?”

GrandPa shook his head, “Gwen knows, and she loves the idea.  The other two must never know.  Pauline would do like you, laugh.  Mary Tozer, a preacher’s wife, would be mortified, but there has been shrinkage over the years, and we had to use some medicine to consummate our union.  I was afraid I would have to pull a Catherine the Great type thing, but I have no idea how a guy might do that.”

I should have made the connection, but the words came out before I thought it through.  “Catherine the Great?  Of Russia?”

GrandPa sighed, “The rumor that she had people help her use pulleys and ropes so that she could have sex with a horse.  The rumor that she died by being crushed by the horse when a rope broke is false, since she died after having a stroke in the bathroom, actually dying in bed a day later.  But the idea of having sex with her horse has never been proven or proven false.  It probably stemmed from her sexual appetite and someone saying that if she could, she would, thus, the gossip started flying, and the rumor stuck.  But I am just saying that my nickname that Yolanda gave me is far from accurate these days, and I need medicinal help.  Now, can I get back to the story?”

I continued to snicker, but I nodded my agreement.

GrandPa said, “I hope you are more considerate with the ladies who come in with their problems.”  He sighed.  “Anyway, I was already having a reaction to her strip show.  She pulled down my pants and cheered.  She did things to me that I think, at the time, were probably illegal in half the states in the country.  These days they do worse things.  At the time, I was enjoying the ride, so to speak, but months later, it bothered me as to how she knew how to do all that stuff.  These days, it’s all over the internet, but back then, the methods of learning how were limited.  But Yolanda did not just know how, she was an expert.  When she had her fun and I was, ummm, spent, she gave me the schedule.  Twice each week, I would steal test papers, and twice each week, we would have some fun in her bed.  We kept that up all school year.”

I was fanning myself.  I needed air, but if he had more confessions, I was not about to leave the room.  “GrandPa, in some way, it almost sounds like a humble brag.  You slept with the girl who thought herself to be the crown princess of Tracy.”

GrandPa groaned, “But now as a Christian, I was stealing in order to have fornication which are both sins.  But that all changed once we were out for the summer.  Mr. Worthington knew everything Yolanda had been doing.  He approved up to a point.  Her grades had dramatically improved, due to the cheating.  She had not gotten caught, and I was the only one truly at risk as long as she did not bring a cheat sheet into the classroom where the tests were to be that day.  That was all good, but he was afraid she was enjoying things too much with me, and it had all been arranged for her to marry Buddy Waldorf.  Buddy was two years older and at West Point.  Then, when he graduated, there would be the wedding of the century between the manufacturing giant and the pharmaceutical giant.  The Worthingtons manufactured a variety of things, but as roads replaced railroads for transportation and horse and buggy were nearly totally gone, the Worthingtons were unable to adapt.  That and things like a factory fire and union strikes, with the union knowing that their jobs were in jeopardy.  As for the Waldorfs, they had almost every drug store in Tracy, but then it was discovered that old man Waldorf would get drugs from Mexico or Canada that were not approved by the FDA or illegal drugs, sold off the receiving dock behind some of the drug stores.  That left Yolanda by herself.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  She married Buddy.  They had stairstep children until the Korean Conflict started.  Since he missed World War II, this was his chance to shine.  He was killed by friendly fire.  That is all the report ever said, but he got his Purple Heart and Yolanda got benefits.  After I joined the Hugh McAdoo team, I asked him to check the records.  The non-redacted record was that Captain Buddy Waldorf had been killed by his own men because he was a jerk and a lousy officer.  They feared for their lives under him.  No one was charged with the crime and the unit got multiple citations for bravery beyond the call of duty after that point with the former executive officer in charge.”

I was confused, “But did Yolanda just dump you?  And how does this fit into you meeting Ada, the girl who would become your wife?”

GrandPa slapped his forehead, “You talked about a humble brag, and I skipped to the end.  Yeah, Mr. Worthington wanted Yolanda to cool our relationship during the next year, so that she would be an honors graduate, ready to marry Buddy Waldorf.  But Yolanda got the idea that she was supposed to cut off the relationship entirely, and she devised a way of doing so where all the bridges got burned.  Something that made her father extremely angry.  I imagined that I heard him scream from across town, ‘Yolanda, you idiot!  You haven’t graduated yet!’  But before it makes sense, you have to know about Ada’s parents.  She was Ada Bachmann.  Her father was a Worthington mechanic, Karl Bachmann.  Before the USA joined the war, there was a little anti-German sentiment floating around, mostly those remembering the changing of city names and street names during World War I.  In 1940, to help boost support of Britain, a hate propaganda campaign was started in the US, which only lasted a couple of years.  Even then, by the end of the war, most people hated the Germans, but oddly, the soldiers who fought in Europe mostly thought the German civilians were not to blame.  But a lot of Germans legally changed their names.  The Bachmanns were not Nazis, so they remained proud of their heritage.  Well, Karl Bachmann was driving a company truck across town to pick up raw materials from the railroad depot when his truck was hit by a drunk driver who ran a stop sign.  In any court of law, it would have been the drunk’s fault, but Mr. Worthington paid a judge to find Karl Bachmann negligent.  He had to pay for the wrecked truck, the other guy’s car, and all the lost production at the factory when the parts did not arrive, not to mention the penalties for being late in delivering the material.”

I had to ask, “Were their penalties for late delivery?”

GrandPa smiled at me playing straight man, “I told you not to mention it.  Anyway, the Bachmanns were unable to pay, so the judge required garnishment of wages.  The Bachmanns lost their home.  The Worthingtons gladly had them move into their home.  Karl Bachmann spent six months in bed and it was a year before he could start working again.  So, his wife became the Worthington’s cook and Ada Bachmann became Yolanda’s private slave, and the person to clean her room and do her laundry, which led to Yolanda being excessively messy and dirty, just to have Ada do more work.  Mostly, Ada would read the material that they studied in school and prepped her for each exam.  You say there was no slavery in the USA after that war in the 1860s, but I hear there are more slaves behind the scenes today than there ever was then.  Baldwyn enslaved the people here.  Ada and her Mom, and once her Dad was back at work, they were all slaves because of a crooked judge and a rich man that had a grudge against Germans.  It was Ada to whom Yolanda gave the wrong test answers.  Ada was smart enough to check and the test with the wrong answers helped Ada study the right material.  As the year went on, Ada got better grades than Yolanda.  Yolanda memorized the answers, afraid of being caught with a cheat sheet.  But she still missed a couple, while Ada would get hundreds.  With Ada at the front of the room, she got more benefit of class participation.”

GrandPa took a break to take a couple of deep breaths.  “Now for the fateful day when everything changed.  Yolanda was such the expert at intimacy because her mother and Buddy Waldorf’s mother had the two children playing with each other from early on, unsupervised.  Maybe someone knew how to do the naughty things and taught them, but they had been intimate for a couple of years before Buddy went off to West Point.  Now, Yolanda misunderstood her father, she had to show me the door, but Yolanda knew that Ada had a schoolyard crush on me since first grade.  Ada was too shy to tell me, and I was too dumb to notice.  Yolanda had to dump me, and she wanted to hurt Ada.  When Yolanda told me when to be at her house, she called Ada into her bathroom an hour earlier.  She was the mistress, and Ada had to do as told.  She told Ada to strip.  She told what she was about to do and who she would do it with.  Then she locked Ada in the bathroom using a skeleton key, an old door lock – before your time.  So, I walk in.  Yolanda says that it is the summer, and we have all day to have fun, so let’s do it twice.  She was more talkative than she had been before, but at first, I did not notice.  She was wanting me to say enough that Ada would overhear.  She wanted Ada to know that Worthington money could buy anything, including the boy Ada liked.  After a couple of hours, I was spent.  As I was wondering if I had enough energy to get out of bed, Yolanda told me that I was done with her.  But she was going to leave me with a much cheaper alternative.  She unlocked the bathroom door.  I saw Ada, standing in the doorframe, scared out of her mind, totally naked.”

GrandPa looked at me, “I looked for that look in the sex worker’s eyes.  I had to save them from that indignity.  I was saving Ada over and over again.  But that first time, I was unable to save her.  Yolanda was in charge.  It took a long time of us hugging and massaging each other before my Millie with the big Willy had any response.  Yolanda kept chiding us that she wanted to see some action.  Yolanda never bothered getting her clothes back on, but she never tried to help us either.  She had drained me physically, and she wanted this to be excruciatingly slow.  But I had heard Yolanda agree as Ada came out of the bathroom that if she had sex with me, she was freed from her slavery.”

GrandPa wiped away the tears, “Then, I cannot remember all the things that we said to each other, but Ada was afraid Yolanda would beat her again, and this time, she might die.  I had to finish the job.  Of course, that made it that much harder to be able to do it.  I was scared for her.  I told her that I would take her away and marry her.  Ada said that I was crazy for saying that, but I told her that I wanted her to know that I had fun with Yolanda all year, but I could see in her eyes that she was different, and this union between us was meant to be.  I finally got my strength back and we completed the deal.  Yolanda laughed saying that she hoped Ada was now pregnant.  When Ada asked about her getting pregnant, Yolanda laughed and said she wore a diaphragm, but Ada had no such protection.  Ada and I got dressed, and I told Yolanda that Ada was leaving with me.  Yolanda went back on her word, deciding to keep Ada as her slave, but I grabbed Ada and we left.  When we went past the kitchen, Ada told her mother that bad things had happened and that I was rescuing her.  I brought her home.  We did not have a spare bedroom, so we slept together, but we almost never got intimate, and when we did, we had protection.  But I had to right the other wrong.  I stole money from here and there all over town, and I stole everything from the Worthington’s safe, including embarrassing documents and photographs.  I met Mr. Worthington with witnesses on both sides.  I offered the cash for the freedom of the Bachmanns.  He refused.  I suggested that I could show my friends what is in these documents and photos, and he turned red.  He called me a lot of things including a Yegg, which I readily admitted.  I got to keep the money, but he took the folder and handed over the Bachmanns.”

GrandPa sobbed, “And now you know about the nickname ‘Millie’.  You know how I could differentiate between someone who enjoys the sex trade, and someone trapped in it.  You know what my reason for living became from that moment on.  It was not out of Christian love, I had to make up for the one time I was complicit in not saving someone from that act, even the one time.  Ada and I were married at the courthouse with her parents and a couple of my friends in attendance.  My father, grandfather, and uncles said the courthouse gave them hives.  I understood, so we had the reception at the house so they could kiss the bride.  Then I used the money I had stolen to earn the freedom for the Bachmanns and the four of us moved into a house in another neighborhood, not too pricey of a neighborhood or folks would ask where I got the money.  I might have been a crook, but I was a humble man, just very confident in my skills.”

As I started blowing my nose for the tenth time, GrandPa added, “Hey, give me some of those tissues.  I need to wipe my eyes and nose too!”

At that moment, the door burst open.  PawPaw entered with the two little ones in the stroller and Kanok running in front of him.

“Mommie Pinkie!” Kanok said, “Aunt Jochebed has a dry milk tank.  You have to take over. Spa-Cool is still thirsty!”

I grabbed my wrap and Pink Sparkle Apple Yeggs.  “An experienced wet nurse with a dry milk tank?  Where does Kanok get these ideas?!”

Credits

The first photocopier was invented in the late 1930s, but they were not commercially available for another 14 years, roughly.  But even then, the mimeograph machine, with its pungent methanol smell (methyl alcohol, a.k.a. wood alcohol), was used throughout the fifties in schools.  We thought we had seen a marvel of engineering when our school got one that turned the crank on its own.  When I was in the younger grades, the kids that were doing well in school got to turn the crank by hand to print the homework assignments or the test, one sheet at a time, anything that had to be copied and given to every student.

I do not think there were any Worthingtons in the Dick Tracy world, but Buddy Waldorf was a two-year-old boy who was kidnapped by Big Boy Caprice.  Big Boy tried to make his escape by ship.  At one point Dick Tracy is thrown overboard, but he, of course, is rescued.  Then later, Big Boy tries to throw Buddy Waldorf overboard, but Dick Tracy and the police come to the rescue.  Buddy’s father, John H. Waldorf, was a rich financier in Tracy.

There was a hiding place from the bullies like the “arch” when I was in school. And when in high school, they used the hiding place to smoke.

I try to check for duplications of people names.  There have been an Ada Bachmann here or there, but there was a famous Karl Bachmann.  He was a major in the Swiss Guard, serving France.  He was assigned the detail to protect Louis XVI, king of France, when the revolutionary mob stormed his forces, overpowering them.  He was captured and put on trial by the revolutionaries.  In the midst of the trial, the mob extracted him from the courtroom, he was bound for the gallows.  Eventually, he was beheaded at the guillotine a few days later.

And one of the reasons for writing this story, other than to reveal Millennium’s raison d’etre, reason for living, was to remind people that some estimates state that there are more slaves in the United States than there were in America in the 1860s when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  And with human traffickers kidnapping people in the USA and sending them overseas, it is even worse than that.  Yet, there is something just short of slavery that is even more prevalent.  Bad debt, lack of equal employment elsewhere, or simple intimidation allows bosses to withhold pay increases or requiring unpaid overtime due to projects being behind.  The workers are too busy to see if the competitor is hiring, thus they get trapped in their job – not slavery, but just as oppressive.

I researched anti-German sentiment.  In World War I, anti-German sentiment was strong.  Towns changed their names.  People changed their names.  Food names were changed.  And there was violence.  This was less the case in World War II, until 1940 when the government started a hate campaign against Germany.  By 1943, even while in the war, this hatred of German neighbors in the USA started to dwindle, but by the war’s end, nearly three of every four American civilians blamed Germans in general, while the army did not blame German civilians.

Tommy Dorsey recorded in 1943 in spite of the musician’s strike (1942-1944).  The strike led to the decline of Big Band music in favor of the singers.  Dorsey had cut ties with Jo Stafford in 1942, and he picked up Frank Sinatra.  The top song in 1943 was the Mills Brothers singing Paper Doll, but the Tommy Dorsey band with Sinatra had three songs in the top twenty.  A few band leaders had joined the military by this point.

And contraception included condoms and diaphragms by the 1940s.

Just before I met my wife, she had a friend from El Paso, TX visit her in Port Arthur, TX.  They had gone to Houston, TX for a day of fun, and on the way home in my wife’s Duster (automobile), a drunk constable ran a stop sign and T-boned her car.  Her friend was severely injured, and my future wife was severely rattled, but only minor bumps.  The constable, an officer of the law, had just found out he had cancer.  His first reaction was to drink himself into oblivion, but then he drove home, severely intoxicated.  Everyone involved had pity for the constable, except my future father-in-law.  The insurance company would repair the car, but what about the injuries?  The insurance company did not want to have this case go to court so they gave my wife a few hundred dollars and the friend got about twice that much.  But visiting the friend many years later, she still had complications from the accident.  While possibly nine out of ten cases that go to court are money grabs, this was a case that should have gone to court, but it was unclear, due to the sympathy for the drunk driver, whether they would have gotten a fair trial.

My wife’s accident might not happen today, since the Winnie Road is limited access through the town of Winnie where the accident happened.  And thinking of the Winnie Road, a road that is mostly straight from Winnie, TX to just north of the Port Arthur refineries (and south of Port Acres where my in-laws had lived) to Groves, TX before merging with another highway before reaching the Bridge City bridge, at the time it was built, the tallest bridge of its kind.  It is said that the mayor of Beaumont, Texas, upstream from the bridge, insisted that the bridge be tall enough to have the tallest ship afloat pass underneath the bridge, which was the Queen Mary at the time.  The Queen Mary never went under the bridge, but oilrigs, made in Beaumont, had to add ballast and sink a little, to make it under the bridge.  After the tugs worked hard to get the oilrigs under the bridge, the water was pumped out so that the oilrig would float higher in the water (less resistance in moving it).

And while we are on the Winnie Road, I have mentioned driving from Houston to Port Arthur with people from coast to coast.  I have marveled at the response that seems universal for anyone who drove that boring stretch of highway (marsh grass, rice fields, and no hills in sight, one bridge over Taylor Bayou, high enough for pleasure boats to go underneath).  Their response was always very loud, “The Winnie Woad!”  For full effect, hold the “O” for a while, and never with an “R” in “Woad”.  It was shocking to hear that said just that way, when some of these people lived their lives more than a thousand miles away.  They had to have only visited the area.