Les David

    Avoid that goose no matter what.  Or was it a gander?

     On a quest, I found myself about two miles south of Genoa.  The place seemed oddly familiar, even though the old house was pretty run down and the yard and outbuildings in a state of disrepair.

      It must be the old Les David place.  (Luster William David died in 1974.)  Then the old memory machine kicked into gear.  It had to have been in the early 1950’s, because Les and Irene’s son Bill was in Korea at the time.

     Les was always a piano player.  He had this marvelous machine that would cut a vinyl record.  It was 78 rpm, I think, even though it is the smaller size, like a “45”.  I still have the record.  But I don’t have a record player that will do 78 rpm records anymore.  

     Since it was the early 50’s, I would have been somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6 or 7.  We all loaded up in the old Chev and trekked down to Les’s place.  It seems like it was a Sunday afternoon.  As I recall, Dad, Uncle Walter, and Les made a record or two to send to Bill in Korea, where he was serving in some branch of the service. 

     We went home with a record, too.  It would be nearly 70 years old now.

     I remember getting bored with the music and venturing outside.  But our outdoor activities were severely limited.  We had to stay inside the yard and keep the gate closed because that goose or gander would attack if we ventured into the farmyard outside of the fence.

 

       Thinking of Bill David caused another set of memories, memories of Syracuse, Kansas where Bill spent some time with Aunty and Uncle, playing music.  Except I don’t think Bill played any instrument.  I think he was a spectator.

      What I do remember is the way he balanced a burning cigarette on his lower lip.  He could carry on a conversation with that cigarette bobbing up and down with his lower lip.

    “No Walt, ‘lack’ I told Bessie. . . “ he would say as an intro to an anecdote or an opinion.   I wonder where Bill picked up his southern accent.

      And thinking of Bill made me think of other “characters” we met in Syracuse, one being a guy named Jack Pepper, I think.  He was a guitar picker with a 6-jack amplifier, a huge old box.  More memorable, he was a hypnotist. 

      He tried to hypnotize Uncle Ricky.  “Concentrate on your hand,” he would say over and over.  “Your hand is rising.  When your hand touches your forehead, you will be asleep.”  Or something like that. 

       Uncle Ricky’s hand did rise and touch his forehead, and he seemed asleep, but when Jack asked him to do something, he came out of the trance.  So Jack hypnotized his wife.

     He tried to get her to play the piano, but she was very shy and only sat at the keyboard shivering.  So he told her that when she came out of the trance, she would go into the bedroom and bring out a chair and invite Jack to sit in it.

      He brought her gently out of her zombie state.  When she was fully awake, she walked into the nearby bedroom, grabbed a chair and brought it out and said, “Have a chair, Jack.”

      He said, “Honey, I’m already sitting down,” and laughed.  She opined that she didn’t care to be hypnotized again.  The “piano” session had worn  her out physically and mentally, apparently, even though she had no recollection of sitting at the piano and refusing to play.

      When she was invited to play after her “spell” was over, she refused.  She wasn’t at all certain of her piano playing skills.  Jack said that a person couldn’t be persuaded to do something under hypnosis, that they wouldn’t ordinarily do.  I guess he proved it, too.  He said the idea that a bad actor hypnotizing an ordinary person and turning them into a murderer was total fiction.  

      All of this stimulated by a wild goose chase south of Genoa.  More on my wild goose chase next time.  Stay tuned.