Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book III), Part 94: Beercycling the Danube Cycle Path with Pfifferlinge and Dunkel, 2003 and 40 Years of Sidebars: The Complete 35 Days of Beercycling 2003 Journal (Germany, Austria) with photos.
My father spent most of his life residing a 20-minute walk outside the hamlet of Georgetown, in Floyd County, Indiana.
Granted, there was a significant foreign interlude from 1942 through 1946, when his primary address was a bunk on a Navy ship cruising the Pacific (U.S.M.C.; serving as a gunner). In 1950 – 51, the Marines invited him back for an all-expenses-paid sojourn in California, where he trained troops headed for Korea.
Rog Sr. also left Indiana during the summer in 1949, playing minor league baseball for the Cherokees of the Class D Appalachian League in Kingsport, Tennessee. His numbers were middling, but at 24, he probably was too old to start at the bottom.
My father lived in three successive houses located on Baylor-Wisman Road, a rural lane named for his father and a neighboring farmer, with surroundings genuinely embodying the bucolic attractiveness of the American countryside prior to the asphalt-laden imperatives of postwar sprawl. As I was growing up, it began changing rapidly.
He seldom had anything positive to say about “city life,” which to him represented a phenomenon endured by sad and unfortunate people who were crowded more closely together than could possibly be healthy, with far too much traffic as well as too little room to breathe freely. Georgetown’s evolution into today’s metro Louisville suburb caused him to conclude ruefully that city life was getting too close for comfort.
By then, the die was cast.
As was the case with my father’s advocacy of big bands, baseball and beefsteak, he actively sought to raise me “right.” The primacy of rural areas formed the basis of his lessons; he was a natural born pantheist and cared not a jot for religious superstition, undoubtedly a great plus for me.
To prove his point, vacation involved loading up the car and driving hell bent for leather to the Western United States, then experiencing as much of the outdoors as possible for two weeks. My mother’s seeming indifference to it all added mystery to the enterprise.
It wasn’t negotiable that’s we’d be headed for Wyoming, although later my father indulged my American Civil War obsession with short battlefield visits...Read more
