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More Raisin' Delta Cain
~~An Unorthorized Sequel
by Cliff Prewett
The far reaching implications of one's actions in a little town aren't always clear when one's head is limited by one's youthful years. But, thirty-three years after the fact, Kent Fletcher's recent article on this site about the mysterious aerial explosion above the old City Hall building in Cleveland, Mississippi, on New Year's Eve, 1968, is now reverberating here in Dallas, Texas, even if the explosion didn't.
I can still hear the windows rattling and see my dog, a Dachshund already of short temper and taut nerves, rolling down the hallway in our little house on Seventh Avenue. She was asleep on the bed in the master bedroom when Kent's bomb went off, a forbidden activity, but one which I largely ignored unless the other half was around. I had joined her there and was sprawled across the bed watching celebrations around the country on the old black and white TV. When the bomb went off she gave a short yelp of panic, and bit me square in the keester. Hard. She eventually came to rest in a built-in clothes hamper in the bathroom. Didn't come out for two days. That's a good thing. It took me that long to be able to sit down.
The nature of small towns being what it is, it didn't take long for the word to get around. As far as I know no one ever knew who set the bomb, but many of us pretty much figured out why. There just wasn't a lot to do in our little town in 1968. As an expatriate, comfortably out of reach of my partners in crime, I can tell you that such shenanigans were far more common than one might expect. And while we might have been considered youthful at the time, some of us were older than Kent and should have known better.
In the middle sixties Life magazine ran an extensive article on UFO's, complete with pictures and including detailed instructions on the building of a device used to create UFO hoaxes by kids in California. They should'na done it. A local compadre of mine had clipped the article when it was published and showed it to several of us while we were visiting one night. Yep. You guessed it. One Sunday evening a few days later we found that it took less than an hour to put one together out of easily available items.
Powered by hot air from a row of candles mounted across its base, it was essentially nothing more than the protecting film cover from some dry cleaning returned by the cleaners, with the hole taped together at the top. Cross members at the bottom were constructed from plastic straws. That's it. Light, aerodynamic, and capable of altitudes in excess of a thousand feet on a still night, even more in cool weather.
I worked at the local radio station then. Located on the outskirts of the city, it provided excellent cover for this kind of shenanigan, but we were afraid it was too far removed from city residents to create the kind of uproar that we felt would justify all this hard planning and labor on our part. We built it there, but one of us took it to the opposite edge of town to turn it loose after dark. The rest of us waited quietly at the station to wait for the phone to ring. It did. Didn't take more than ten minutes. We heard about it before our accomplice called to say that the dirty deed had been done. There were four phone lines installed at the time. It was an hour before we could get a call out.
You wouldn't believe the descriptions we got of this "alien" device that cruised in silence above the Fairfield subdivision. We switched the phones to the speakers in the studio and laughed so hard that not a word was said sometimes for twenty minutes at a time. But what else ya gonna do for entertainment in a small Delta town on Sunday night?
To this day I believe that if it hadn't been for our women we'd have simply disintegrated. Men appeared to function normally in the cold light of day, but there may not have been a male in the entire city whose derangement didn't bubble only slightly below the surface. At any age.
[Postscript: And, by the way Kent, would you lean on older brother Jack a little? Maybe he figured out along the way just who it was that turned Effie Glassco's little bitty Nash Rambler sideways in her single car garage one Sunday night. In the decades she taught senior English at Cleveland High that may have been the only Monday morning she was late for school.]
COMMENT from Mike Kingdom-Hocking:
Raisin' Delta Cain I & II. Looks like you're providing a service for letting skeletons outa closets, Beth. I remember a UK high school prank a bit like turning the Nash sideways in the garage. The speaker for one of our evening activities arrived in a Messerschmit bubble car (remember 'how do I get this thing outa second gear?'). The lads managed to carry it into the boys' john, where it fitted with inches to spare all 'round.
COMMENT from Don E. Petty:
Have enjoyed chatting with BIGSATS on AOL rows many times. Knew he had personality and humor and congeniality, and his writing here confirms it. Pleasure to read. DP.
WRITER BIO: Cliff Prewett, a resident of Dallas in his native Texas, will tell you simply that he is a life-long student of people of all colors, attitudes, lifestyles, and beliefs-- an endless quest that necessarily began with himself the week of his sixteenth birthday, one from which there is no chance of graduation.
On 5 January 1959, he had the good fortune to move, alone, into the small town of Cleveland in the central Mississippi Delta. He thought he was looking for a career in the broadcasting business having already been on the air for a year. What he found over the next two decades was the meaning of character.
Fighting proud of his Texas roots, he'll also tell you that if it takes a village to raise a child, the Mississippi Delta was his village, and that when they're missing an idiot they call him. [HIS words!]
Ye Editor regrets to report that Cliff Prewett died in the spring of 2004. His memory and stories will live on!
Click this link to read another of Cliff's stories -- one of the funniest in the USADS archives: "Having a Bad Hair Day."
To leave a comment, please write Ye Editor at bethjacks@hotmail.com.
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