A quiet stroll among sleeping heroes

Two days ago marked my 65th Memorial Day.

I observed it by walking--for almost two miles--among and around the sleeping souls of dead heroes at the East Tennessee Veterans Cemetery.

Walking about an hour each day is my daily routine, but this particular stroll was special.

There, at the little cemetery about 25 miles east of Knoxville, Tenn., (a short drive off I-81) I felt the essence of Memorial Day.

Old Glory flapped proudly in a breeze, while hundreds of simple white markers, each with an American flag, seemed to stand at attention.

This a solemn, peaceful, reverential place. People kneel and pray and hold hands and take pictures here. They touch the markers, close their eyes and remember their loved ones. Or maybe they just come here to pay their respects on Memorial Day.

Because this is where heroes slumber but should never be forgotten. Many of them served in one of the World Wars, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. They were soldiers, airmen or seamen. Men and women sleep here.

Heroes all of them.

I never knew Jay Rogers Daniel Jr. (May 17, 1956-March 7, 2014) but his headstone says this U.S. Army seargent was a Vietnam veteran. He was also a "BELOVED FATHER, BROTHER AND PAPAW."

Likewise, I never had the honor of knowing Albert Charles Stephenson (Oct. 14, 1956-March 1, 2014). This Vietnam veteran who served in the U.S Air Force is now "SAFE IN THE ARMS OF GOD," according to his tombstone.

Thank you for your service, Jay Rogers Daniel Jr. and Albert Charles Stephenson, and rest in eternal peace in the arms of angels in Heaven.

Last but not least, I remember my Dad, Lawrence C. Timbs, who died at the age of 90 in January 2012. He retired from the U.S. Air Force and saw action in World War II and Korea. And my Mother, Dixie Nadine Jenkins Timbs, Dad's ever-devoted helpmate who died on July 4, 2013. They do not sleep at the East Tennessee Veterans Cemetery; instead, they rest peacefully about 100 miles away near Elizabethton, Tenn.

Happy Memorial Day, Mom and Dad.

Quail Hollow quandary

Some of you know that I'm an "ambassador" (volunteer) at the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, N.C.

This is the big-time PGA tournament that's held each spring at Quail Hollow.

A few weeks ago, my path at Quail Hollow crossed (almost) with golf prodigy J.B. Holmes of Campbellsville, Ky.

Click here to read my column about Mr. Holmes (who won the tournament) and to learn about my long-ago connection with his hometown. The piece was published in The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald.

And in case the link is no longer active, here's the column:

Special to The Herald
By Larry Timbs

I would never have dreamed it in 1975 when, in the dead of winter, I moved from balmy Columbia, S.C., to frigid Campbellsville, Ky., and rented an $80-a-month farmhouse. I had taken a job—“way back then”—as the country and western song goes, working as a $160-a-week-reporter for the Central Kentucky News Journal in Campbellsville.

But here I was, 39 years later, in late April and early May of 2014 at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, N.C., working as a volunteer—as I have for the past seven years—for the Wells Fargo Championship.

This year, however, proved to be extra special at the fabulously beautiful and lush green golf course that some say rivals even Augusta National and the Masters as THE tournament on the PGA tour.

For one thing, the weather was picture perfect—gloriously sunny, warm, with a refreshing breeze. The golf Gods seemed to be embracing the genteel old Quail Hollow Club and its esteemed 7,200-yard champion golf course.

A guy from Campbellsville, Ky., won. A man who they say competed on his high school golf team when he was in third grade.

His name, as I’m sure many reading this column knows, is J.B. Holmes.

Mr. Holmes, described in the Charlotte media as having a quirky sense of humor, sank one last squeamish 38-inch putt, on the 18th hole, and clinched his fist in victory.

What a story and what a PAYDAY ($1.24 million) for the golf prodigy from Campbellsville (population 11,000 in 2012) who has overcome brain surgeries, a broken ankle and tennis elbow.

At Quail Hollow, Holmes defeated the likes (among others) of Phil Mickelson, Angel Cabrera, Jim Furyk, Rory McIlroy and Web Simpson. (Tiger Woods, a crowd favorite who won here a few years ago, wasn’t in the field at Quail Hollow because he’s hurt. 2014 Masters champion Bubba Watson, who usually competes in the Wells Fargo Championship, decided to sit this one out.)

The down side of it was I actually witnessed very little of Holmes’ magic. That’s because I worked nonstop shuttling members of the Quail Hollow Club from the members’ parking lot to the clubhouse. I drove a six-seat golf cart all week long (hauling members back and forth from their cars to the club), and about the only golf action I saw was when I could steal a glance at the jumbotron.

And there, spectacular as life on the big screen throughout the last holes of the Wells Fargo Championship, was J.D. Holmes.

Occasionally one of my golf cart passengers would tap me on the shoulder and ask me if I knew where Holmes was from. I grinned and told them proudly that he comes from a little town in central Kentucky called Campbellsville. And then I’d share with them that I've been there and know it well and that it’s probably a place they’ve never heard of, but now they’re going to hear about it big time…

Everyone I spoke to said it was refreshing to have a "new face and new name" win here.

When it was all over—and Holmes had his trophy and amazing payday, as well as big boost in the FedEx Cup standings, I raced from my golf cart to the clubhouse. I wanted desperately to snap a picture of Quail Hollow’s latest victor. I had my iPhone with me. If I could just somehow get past all the security and get access to him and tell him I represented his hometown newspaper (the Central Kentucky News-Journal) I felt confident he’d give me a few quotes.

I went to the clubhouse. No J.B. Holmes. I went to the Media Center. He had just left there—and gone to the clubhouse, according to one man in a blue Wells Fargo blazer. I bolted back to the clubhouse—and a police officer told me Holmes would probably come out of the locker room and be shuttled to his hotel in Charlotte or to the airport.

Police officers and smiling sourthern belles in brightly colored sundresses with huge bouquets of flowers lingered outside the locker room entrance.

We waited and we waited and we waited.

But no one saw J.B. Holmes.

I missed getting his picture and those quotes. (Max Heath, my old demanding editor in Campbellsville—and my good friend for many years who in 1998 established a scholarship in my name at Winthrop University--would have been disappointed in me.)

Maybe J.B. Holmes had had his fill of the media and hangers on and escaped through an underground tunnel. And surely by now he was back in Taylor County, Kentucky, where I worked as a reporter and news editor for the twice weekly Central Kentucky News-Journal in the late 1970s—and where two of my children were born.

I like to think he’d have talked to me if I could have met him.

Maybe another day.


Note: Larry Timbs, who has fond memories of Campbellsville and Taylor County, Kentucky, worked as a reporter and news editor for the Central Kentucky News-Journal in the 1970s. He credits that first newspaper job in Campbellsville as launching his career as a journalist. He retired in May 2012 as an associate professor of mass communication/journalism at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. He has recently published a novel titled “Fish Springs: Beneath the Surface” http://www.fishspringsnovel.com/—available in bookstores and via Amazon starting June 1, 2014.

For the love of a dog

One thing I know for certain in this uncertain life is that there’s a tight bond between a man and his dog.

My two dogs are Michael Jackson (a bichon) and Little Joe (a sheltie). Those are the two loveable four-legged bundles of fur in the photo accompanying this blog post.

Someone once said that dog spelled backwards is God. I don't mean to wax spiritual, but how can we NOT deeply cherish our dogs? Because life is hard, even under the best of circumstances, but with the love of a dog, it's richer, more meaningful.

Think of it:

1. We learn to communicate with our dogs and they talk back to us. By that, I mean they wag their tails, bark or otherwise respond in dog speak.
2. Our dogs take us for a good, healthy walk every day--if we only make time for them.
3. When we walk our dog (or they walk us), others, admiring our pet, will stop and ask us questions about breed, age, personality. We completely understand why WE are not the focus of their curiosity and affection. These strangers, who seldom give us eye contact, are taken almost completely by our dog, and that’s as it should be.
4. We find ultimate, wonderful contentment and happiness and peace of mind with our dogs. When I'm depressed or am sad or feeling alone, my dog is always there for me. He cheers me up, makes me smile...
5. Our dogs make us better, more caring and more selfless human beings. That's because they ask for our love and return it faithfully and unconditionally to us.

And I recently came across this--which says a lot about people and their dogs:

"People who really love their dogs are the most kind and giving people. We are the ones who don't freak out because our dogs gave us a kiss or ate off our plate. We don't leave our dogs out in the heat or cold and when we lay down at night our dogs are on the bed or at least snuggled close by safe from the dark and dangers that roam in the night. We love our dogs despite their stinky breath and dog slobber. We love all dogs we have had in the past and especially the ones we have now."

I’ve been living, the past several months, in Johnson City, Tenn. And guess where I love to hang out. It's not any of the usual places that town leaders boast of. It's not ETSU. It's not the glitzy mall. It’s not the sporting venues—baseball fields, football or soccer fields, basketball palaces. It's not Olive Garden, Ruby Tuesdays, Panera Bread, and it’s not even Chick-Fil-A (my all-time favorite fast food eatery).

I'm drawn, instead to the Johnson City Dog Park. I go there often to pass the time with Michael Jackson and Little Joe. And I’ve met some good folks there. It’s about 3-4 acres of fenced in grass, trees, benches and fountains (where our dogs can romp and play and get a cool drink). And I’ve met some nice people there as well—gals like Bridgitt and Holly and Valerie and men like Bill, Bob, Chuck and Marvin.

Dog lovers all of them.

Good-hearted people all of them.

They have to be. Because their dogs help make them that way.

Arf, arf!

Some newspapers don't get it...

Like tens of millions of people in America and around the world, I've become entranced with the practically round-the-clock cable news coverage of missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370.

This is the biggest and most befuddling mystery in the history of aviation.

So many false leads. So many experts with their theories. Very few shreds of hard evidence.

How in tarnation does a Boeing 777 airliner with 239 souls aboard vanish into nothingness? No sign of crash wreckage unless those most recent fuzzy satellite images a couple of days ago will finally prove that the plane is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. As I write this now, however, spotters aboard ships and planes have scoured that region (where the satellites supposedly snapped the images) about 1,500 miles west of Perth, Australia. And the spotters have found nothing.

I worked in aircraft control and warning (radar) eons ago in the U.S. Air Force. Because of that, my sister asked me about four days after the Boeing 777 disappeared what I thought may have happened. I responded that I was just guessing, like everyone else, but it appeared to me that the Triple 7 had been hijacked. At the time I shared that with her, hardly anyone else had that theory. Now it's on the front burner of what may have happened to one of the world's safest and most technologically sophisticated passenger jets.

Putting on my journalism education hat, I continue, here in day 13 or 14 of the search for the jetliner to be amazed at why so many newspapers seem to give the BIGGEST STORY ON THE PLANET RIGHT NOW such scant coverage.


Note the photos of front pages that accompany this blog. One is from yesterday's edition of the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press. The other is today's online front page of The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald. Neither one of these front pages has one single word about the missing jet.

Hey, folks in journalism, this blog post is a wakeup call: the story of missing flight 370 is what people right now all over the world, in small towns and large ones, are talking about. They are devouring it. Don't believe me? Ask a few random people eating in restaurants or shopping in malls for what news they're most closely following. It's not Ukraine or Crimea. No one much cares about the shirtless horseback riding Russian President Putin (although that WAS intriguing how he rode that animal.)

What they DO care about is missing flight 370. What's happened to it? What's become of all those "souls" (cable TV news' words) on board?

Come on newspapers! Key into what readers REALLY want to know about, and do it on your showcase front pages--while the story of flight 370 is red hot gripping.

Kicking "corpse" in body bag shocks funeral home

What if they thought you were dead--so dead they had zipped you up in a body bag and carted you to a funeral home for embalming--but you were still alive?

Growing up, I remember as a boy all those Edgar Allan Poe movies about premature burial (meaning interment of people they thought had died, but they hadn't really). Instead those supposedly dead men and women still had beating hearts, but for some reason coroners or whoever couldn't detect them. So the poor unfortunate souls were put in coffins and laid to rest in graves.

In the Poe movies, you'd get a ghastly inside glimpse of those buried-alive folks scratching and clawing at the inside of their coffins, breathing what little precious air they had left to breathe, screaming and crying--all to no avail.

Horror upon grisly horrors.

And now a 78-year-old man in Lexington, Mississippi came "within a pea" (as my grandmother used to say) of suffering the same unthinkable fate.

After a coroner pronounced Walter Williams dead a few nights ago, his nephew told ABC affiliate WAPT that he stood there and watched the funeral home people zip Williams up in a body bag.

Whereupon a thought-to-be-dead Mr. Williams was taken to a place that specializes in taking care of the dead.

But just before they began embalming him, someone detected a kicking inside the body bag.

Imagine what the embalmers thought!

"He was not dead, long story short," the funeral home manager said.

So why was the man (shown in the picture accompanying this blog post) pronounced dead in the first place? A coroner surmises that his pacemaker may have shut down temporarily (stopping his heart) when he examined Williams and made the call.

So they put Mr. Williams in that body bag, and somewhere between where he "died" and the funeral home, the pacemaker restarted.

"It was a miraculous moment," said the coroner, who is an elected official and not a medical doctor. "Never in my life have I seen anything like it."

Williams' family members rejoiced, of course, and his story made national news.

Nagging, haunting question: How many others (still alive) have been embalmed and buried?

By the way, click here for a narrator's reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Premature Burial."

Rattlesnake gets the best of man of God

When will those snake-handling preachers ever learn?

Another one died a few days ago in backwoods Kentucky after being bitten by a rattlesnake.

He had handled the deadly serpent at his church-- Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in Middlesboro, Ky.

The angry snake sank its fangs into him during the church service, but preacher Jamie Coots refused medical treatment, declaring that his life was in God’s hands.

He went home and declined quickly.

The rattlesnake’s venom quickly did its thing, and when an ambulance crew arrived and tried to treat him, Coots—gradually losing consciousness—refused their help.

When the medical crew returned to his home about an hour later, the Pentecostal minister was dead.

The snake that bit him on the hand had been handled many times previously, over several months, by Coots and others at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name. This according to Coots’ son, Cody Coots: "It's been carried hundreds of times, handled all kinds of times but now when it's your time to go, it's just your time to go."

What a painful, horrible way to leave this world—and all because of a verse in the Bible (Mark 16:18) that asserts (some fundamentalist preachers fervently believe) that if you handle deadly serpents, God will protect you from being hurt.

It’s mind boggling that snake-handling preachers—many of them in the Southern Appalachian Mountains—continue tempting the Almighty.

ABC News reported that about poisonous snakes are used in about 125 churches in America every day.

Unbelievable!

On a more positive note, I heard an interesting sermon yesterday. Seems, according to Rob Sweet, teaching pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Johnson City, Tenn., that all of us are confronted with what he calls an “ever-present gap which leads us to a never-ending pursuit.”

A pursuit of what?

A pursuit toward closing the gap that hinders the joy and fulfillment of our loving and understanding Jesus. The gap is there because of junk or misdeeds we’ve committed in our past. But we have to get beyond all that, forget what lies behind and focus on having a deeper, more meaningful relationship with Jesus.

We need to press on toward the positive. We need to keep striving and pursuing that which is Holy and good and right.

And we don’t need to be handling rattlesnakes to underscore our faith.

Our book due out in a few months

I've blogged about this before but finally I believe it's going to happen.

I'm about to become an author (more accurately, a co-author) of a published book.

Our novel is titled "Fish Springs: Below the Surface" and you can click here for our teaser website.

It's a teaser site because "Fish Springs" won't actually be available on Amazon or in book stores till June 1, 2014.

It's also possible that it'll be made into a TV movie. But more about that in the coming months.

"Fish Springs" (named after the remote mountain community in East Tennessee where my Dad was born and raised) has been a long time coming. A lot of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting (you get the idea).

It will be published by Ingalls Publishing Group--based in the N.C. High Country. Thank you, Bob and Barbara Ingalls for publishing our novel! Heartfelt appreciation, too, to Ingalls senior editor Judy Geary for taking a diamond in the rough (my opinion) and helping make it sparkle.

So this blog post is just an early shout-out from yours truly and my coauthor, Michael Manuel.

Stay tuned for more information.