RIVER RATS: The big flirt

Published 1:00 pm Thursday, May 7, 2020

In my generation, people worked hard to make this country into a good and decent place to live. The generations before did the same thing. All that hard work paid off, because for many years, the hard work, along with God’s help, meant happiness dwelled in most everyone’s heart. This was a time when the entire family worked, and it only made their time off for pleasure more joyful.

We kids grew up when hunting, fishing and camping out on the river or creek banks were the top of our entertainment list. Why would we have a need for anything else? If happiness had anything to do with it, we were on top of the world.

All the things kids have today would have just been in our way of having so much fun. To hear a hound dog barking up a tree after an old possum was music to our ears. Nowadays, kids like hard rock and rap music. We did like rock music, but it was rockabilly with greats like Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams and Marty Robbins.

Then one day, our good life was gone forever. Many of us old codgers still wonder what went wrong. I give God the credit for letting us grow up in the best times this country will ever know. We boys were a little mischievous, because at times, some of us liked to swipe watermelons out of my Uncle Jim Rose’s patch. I knew of some even swiping chickens from someone’s barnyard to make a chicken stew for their girlfriends. It took me a long time to to talk those knotheads into stopping that.

When several boys got together, one always wanted to be the ringleader. Needless to say, I never got that role. I stayed in the background as a follower more than a leader. There was one of us River Rats that did not play basketball nor baseball. He wanted to sit on the sidelines behind the cheerleaders. He was just a big flirt, always cheering on the cheerleaders. He was the kind that made out like the girls didn’t like him, but I believe he didn’t want to play ball because he wanted to be close to those girls. Did I mention he played the guitar and sang love songs to them? His favorite was “Have I Told You Lately that I Love You?”

My girlfriend was one of the cheerleaders. During a game, I happened to look up and saw my old buddy leaning very close to her. He noticed I saw them and quickly turned his head and began talking to a girl behind him. It was obvious I was going to have to watch him like a hawk.

He tried hard to keep his flirty ways undercover, but he was just a big ole smooth operator when it came to the girls. You might have called him a secret agent when it came to the girls he knew. If it hadn’t been for this old flirt, I might have had plenty of girlfriends, but after I lost my first girlfriend, I had to go to a different school to find another one because he had all the girls at our school corralled and locked up in a holding pen. He is just an old flirt. Maybe I could have learned from him.

There was one girl that he literally flipped over in a chair for. Now he was the one corralled and backed up into a holding pen. He turned out to be as meek as a little lamb and no more a flirt — just an old fart. He was real sneaky with his henhouse ways, and in his big-time flirting days, he used a bogus name to different girls, but I knew his real name: Richard McElyea, and no girls, he is not available.

 — Dale Lone Elk Casteel lives in the Coxey community, attended Clements High School and was preparing for his senior year when mobilized into active service in the Army in August 1950. When his class graduated, he was in Korea. He wrote his first story and book at age 70.