It’s summer in Oklahoma, the weather hot and humidity out of sight.  As I drink a beer and dink on my laptop, I’m reminded of the many similar summers I experienced while growing up in northwest Louisiana.

We had no air conditioning then, only a ceiling fan and a lot of open windows.  As I pay attention to my new Eagle’s CD I’m also reminded that the music we listened to back then was either on scratchy LP’s or radios with tinny speakers.

I like the new Eagle’s album.  It has some good songs on the two CD’s, although most a little too country for my tastes.  My personal favorite is Last Good Time in Town sung, and I guess written, by Joe Walsh.

Age-wise I’m contemporaries with the Eagles and I’m happy to hear that in their sixties the boys haven’t lost their creative spark.  I grew up about thirty miles from the equally tiny town where Don Henley lived but hey, thirty miles across the Texas border may as well have been a thousand miles away.

Walsh’s song features one of his patented guitar riffs, his style as catchy as any musician that ever played the instrument.  The lyrics are meaningful but don’t weigh your soul down with some maudlin message.  The beat and back-up instrumentation keep enticing you to get out of your seat and start dancing.  Yes I did!

A new steamy summer and a fresh Eagles album make me happy and I’m glad the boys, in their sixties, haven’t lost their creative spark.  Maybe there’s hope for me yet!

http://www.EricWilder.com

My Brother Jack was born on July the Third and he and I loved fireworks.  We both wanted to be soldiers and we practiced war our entire childhood.  Because of our obsession my favorite holiday, and my Brother Jack’s, was and is the Fourth of July and the one I remember best is the first one that I can remember.

While growing up in small town Vivian, there were no City ordinances barring the use of fireworks.  Every manner of explosives was sold including M-80s and Two-Inchers.  Jack and I are both lucky to have all our digits as we later experimented with everything we could strike a match too.

My buddy Timmy Jon and I even mixed our own batch of gunpowder and almost burned up the house with it.  The first Fourth that I can remember, however, we made do with firecrackers, bottle rockets, sparklers and Roman candles.

On the Fourth of July my Mom and Dad would buy us about ten dollars worth of fireworks.  Ten bucks doesn’t sound like much but you could pop lots of firecrackers for that amount in the sixties.  We always began the fireworks as soon as it was dark enough.

I don’t remember my age but I was old enough to feel the excitement of impending danger.  With our Dad’s help we began lighting sparklers, popping firecrackers and launching one bottle rocket after another.  We soon got down to the good stuff.

‘Hold it in the air and shake it,” My Dad directed as he lit my first-ever Roman candle.

I can still remember the percussion and slight recoil as incandescent flame burst from the coiled-paper barrel of the explosive device.  I couldn’t count at the time but I had a seat-of-the-pants feel for how many fiery rounds the candle contained.  When it was over I held the warm rod in my hand, inhaling acrid smoke and burned powder.  It was an odor I will never forget.

My red-headed Brother Jack was next at bat and he had mischief in mind before my Dad ever lit the candle’s fuse.  My Mother was standing behind us in the open door of our house.  Soon as the candle started spitting fire, Jack began pointing it at anything that caught his fancy - a tree, the family car, me, and finally toward the open door of the house.

Dodging the oncoming fireball, my Mom screamed and jumped off the porch.  Jack put at least three fireballs through the house, luckily catching nothing on fire.  When he finally threw down the spent Roman candle my Dad just shook his head, grabbed the remaining fireworks and walked into the house.  Mom followed him, but not before unloading verbally on Jack.

Nothing much else was ever said about the incident, Mom and Dad giving Brother Jack the benefit of the doubt that what he did was caused by inexperience and lack of good sense.  After living in close proximity to him until I was fifteen, I know better.  He went to sleep that night giggling about scaring my Mom and Dad and getting away with it.

The Fourth of July means a lot more to me than just fireworks and hot dogs and we should all reflect on the sacrifices this wonderful holiday immortalizes.  Still, my favorite holiday remains the Fourth of July and the one I remember best is the first one that I can remember.

http://www.EricWilder.com

The last time I visited my parents in the house where I grew up, before my Mother died, I sat on a stool with my laptop on the bed. This is the room where I lived for seventeen years of my life, the first fifteen along with my older brother Jack. The room is small, sixteen by fifteen, or 240 square feet. These days my brother and I get along very well. Now I know why! If we didn’t, we would have killed each other long before either of us ever graduated from high school. And the room seemed much larger than it does now.

I don’t remember getting along with my brother. Just the opposite. Memories of torment filling every waking moment abound in my mind, torment that usually lasted every single day until one or both of us fell asleep at night. If that’s true, then how did we keep from killing each other?

As I sat there, staring at the walls now decorated with pink print wallpaper, I wonder – did my Mother secretly want girls instead of boys? Even the sheets and comforter on the bed are pink. Yeech!

Now there was a queen-sized bed in the room. Jack and I each had our own beds, small beds. I remember moving them around like forts, taking the plungers out of our BB guns and having cork wars, shooting at each other until my Mother would hear us and race into the room screaming, "Your Daddy’s going to whip your butts when he comes home. Now stop it right now and straighten up this room."

My Father worked in construction and was away from home a lot. When he returned on weekends my Mother would meet him at the door with a belt. We almost always got a whipping before we got a hug. He never hurt us; the whippings were always more bluster than substance.

After pondering this great mystery of life, I’ve decided three things – the way we remember people we once knew is probably totally wrong, our memories of how things used to be are likely completely false and, last but not least, size only matters to adults.

One more thing bothers me, though. Am I wrong about the pink wallpaper?

http://www.EricWilder.com

Yes, even in Edmond America there are pagans.  Check this article out!

The Edmond Sun, Edmond, OK - Local Pagans celebrate summer.

http://www.EricWilder.com

 I realized there was something exciting and quite different about New Orleans the first time that I visited the city. Today, if you go south on Canal Street you will eventually end up at the Mississippi River. The City is in the process of rebuilding, but if you had followed Canal to the River before Hurricane Katrina you would have encountered many tourist attractions such as the Aquarium of the Americas, the World Trade Center and the Canal Street Wharf. Unlike today’s tourist-driven atmosphere you would have found something quite different had you taken the same journey in the 1950's.

I first visited New Orleans during the Eisenhower Era and remember standing on south Canal Street and staring down the hill toward the Mississippi River. New Orleans is a major international seaport and what I saw was a bunch of seedy bars that sailors from many countries frequented when they were in port. The bars were off-limits to American military personnel, and for good reason. They were dangerous, the women you met there "loose," and venereal diseases rampant.

"Those bars are a good place to get killed," my Aunt Carmol, an ex-marine during World War II and no shrinking violet herself, had told my brother and me. "Don’t ever go there."

The Canal Street bars were long gone before I ever had the opportunity to defy Aunt Carmol’s advice. Still, even as a youngster I felt the potential danger and lingering intrigue present around nearly every corner of New Orleans. One less dangerous but very intriguing place that was eventually cleaned up by the U.S. Navy was Storyville, the Big Easy’s early-day fantasy land that did as much to establish the City’s reputation as a latter-day Gomorrah as anything else in its history.

During the early days of New Orleans there was a shortage of females. To alleviate this situation, street prostitutes were released from French prisons on the condition that they migrate to the new colony. In 1744, the number of bordellos and houses of prostitution prompted a French army officer to comment that there were not ten women of blameless character in New Orleans. City-wide prostitution continued until 1897 when a puritanical city official devised a plan to control the problem. The plan resulted in the formation of Storyville.

Locals called Storyville "The District." It existed from 1897 until 1917, the concept of New Orleans’ alderman Sidney Story. Story’s plan wasn’t to legalize prostitution, but to control it by defining the boundaries within which it would not be prosecuted as a crime. The concept worked for nearly two decades and ironically the District became one of the City’s leading tourist attractions.

Despite the belief of many - likely propagated by fictional accounts in literature - Storyville wasn’t located in the French Quarter. It encompassed an area north of the Quarter, just east of Canal Street between N. Rampart and N. Claiborne. Elaborate bordellos, fancy restaurants and dance halls quickly appeared and flourished, along Basin, the street that became a legend because of its association with early jazz.

Jazz flourished in Storyville, although it didn’t originate there. Each bordello was a place for music as well as prostitution and each establishment generally had a piano player to entertain its guests. The bordellos often hired bands to perform, as did the restaurants and clubs that sprang up in the District. Jazz superstars such as Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong often performed there. Storyville was near a train station and many visitors to the City also frequented the bordellos and the clubs to listen to jazz. These visitors, as well as sailors of all nationalities, took this new sound back with them to their cities and countries of origin.

In 1917 the Secretary of the Navy was Josephus Daniels and his nickname "Tea Totaling" perfectly described his tolerance for sin. Daniels insisted that New Orleans either shut down Storyville, or else he would close the naval base across the river in Algiers. The base provided too much income to New Orleans for the City fathers to see it close so they shut down Storyville instead.

A wave of Puritanism swept across the United States during the era of World War I and the residents of New Orleans weren’t exempt from this phenomena. Embarrassed by Storyville, city fathers began systematically dismantling the District. In the years following 1917, all the elaborate bordellos were demolished leaving only a metaphorical scar in place of nearly two decades of irreplaceable history. Even the street names were changed, world famous Basin Street becoming North Saratoga.

Toward the end of World War II, city fathers made yet another planning blunder. Soldiers were returning home from war and needed a place to live, so the Iberville Housing Project was built on the site of Storyville. Never spoken about in travel brochures or in tourist information, the low-cost Iberville Housing Project quickly became dangerous and crime-ridden. Close to the French Quarter, the Project was a place to avoid at all costs instead of the tourist attraction that the District had once been.

Even with the dismantling of Storyville, prostitution never left New Orleans. It simply spread out across the city to places like the seedy bars frequented by sailors on south Canal. Unlike south Canal, transformed now into a tourist attraction rather than a city blight, the area around Storyville remains largely unknown and off limits to tourists.

New Orleans’ city fathers made a colossal blunder when they demolished the historical District. They compounded their error when they covered up their mistake by building the infamous Iberville Project. Finally realizing their horrible error in judgment, they did return the name Basin to the famous street that was home of legendary jazz and fabulous bordellos. 

New Orleans still exudes a well deserved aura of danger and intrigue and there are still more than enough historical sights to see, even though one of the most famous is forever gone. Few vestiges of Storyville remain, yet like the tang of Tabasco Sauce on the palette, its memory remains long after the last spicy bite of Etouffee has been consumed.

http://www.EricWilder.com

It’s almost impossible to grow up in northwest Louisiana without learning how to swim.  My Mother never did and remained afraid of drowning until the day she died.  Because of her inordinate fear of water, she made sure my Brother Jack and I had lessons when we were very young.  From that point on, we were rarely far from the water’s edge.

Jack and I quickly became excellent swimmers.  My favorite TV show was Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges and I always imagined that someday I would become a professional frog man like my hero Mike Nelson.  It cost a quarter to get into the Vivian Municipal Pool and my friends and I went almost every day.  Likening myself to Mike Nelson, the main character on Sea Hunt, I could swim the breadth of the pool underwater ten times without surfacing and I still remember visiting Marineland of the Pacific where many of the episodes were filmed.

I wish some movie producer would make a feature film of Sea Hunt.  I would go see it and I’m sure millions of other baby boomers would also attend.  Who would be the star?  How about Jeff Bridges?

Jack and I bought swim masks, fins and aqualungs as soon as we could afford them.  While neither of us ever made it to a South Pacific atoll it is still on my bucket list.

http://www.EricWilder.com