March 2019 – Tall Tales From Capt Rogue

Brawling Cowboy Style

My younger brother Greg and I used to get into some real “two men enter, one leaves” cage style fights when we were growing up. It was pretty much classic sibling rivalry between a suave, sophisticated older brother and a younger, bull-headed brute of a younger brother. It’s my story and I’m sticking to that.

Two hardheads in 1966. Mom got more milage from our jeans with those iron-on knee patches.

Most of our dust-ups started out innocently enough, as sibling brawls go…the Saturday morning cartoons are over, mom and dad are out grocery shopping… we switch over to old school “Big Time Wrestling” on the TV. After a few drop kicks from Flying Fred Curry, a coco-butt from Bobo Brazil and a stomach claw from Killer Kowalski, one of us would wind up doing a flying elbow drop onto the other from the back of the couch and it was on.

Bobo Brazil has the Shiek in a headlock after a coco-butt or two.

Our fracases generally started out as merely intense wrestling matches, but as we grew tired the moves got more more and more desperate… eye gouging, biting, nard punching, and even the odd wet-willy were all a fairly standard repertoire of moves. As we advanced to back-flip reversals and moves learned about during real wrestling from elementary school gym class, everything intensified.

If you really wanted to escalate you would act like you were going to spit in the other guys face while you were holding him down…seeing how far you could let a spit goober ooze out before sucking it back in two or three times would drive the other to go full clobbering time Hulk. The goal was to make the other guy cry uncle or tap out, and with two hardheaded Profitt’s, bones would have to come close to snapping for that to happen. These death matches could be brutal and go on for 20 or 30 minutes, with no bell to save you. Big Time Wrestling, the 3 Stooges and Looney Tunes cartoons showed us the way.

Film-Notes-Three-Stooges-1 — Learned from the best

Dad had more or less encouraged this rough-housing among us boys from an early age. It was all fun and games until someone got hurt and mom got involved. When we got to the point of breaking furniture and each other too bad he did the classic old-school dad thing and bought us 2 pairs of boxing gloves.

original-boys-boxing-pugilist-gloves_1_e1d9749d7dc51824bdd94fb0dd0ff0c7 — Classic way to settle things

I think he figured this would at least cut down on the eye gouging and finger biting since he could referee. However, having spent 20 years in the Army, where personal issues were settled with gloves, Pugil sticks or in a bear pit, he got a real kick out of us going at it until one of us cried uncle or got a bloody nose. I can still picture him giggling like Dick Dastardly’s dog Muttley as we pummeled the snot out of each other.

0000d18767c977cdfd1d42122b1bfad6 — Muttley found humor in everything,

While he tried to explain the basics of keeping up your guard, jabs, hooks and uppercuts, we always rapidly devolved to a school-yard free for all with us rolling around on the ground…except with boxing gloves on.

As the oldest, I had more of psychological advantage than a physical one. Greg is a year and a half younger but was on the husky side compared to me, so he was pretty close to my size. Our blood would get to boiling until we were like two jacked-up pit bulls waiting to be released at a dog fight. I can’t remember for the life of me what started one of these incidents, but it ended up with me speeding through the house after Greg and out the back door.

This happened in the mid 60’s while dad was still in Vietnam. We had just moved into a brand new house in West Carrollton and the back porch was more a six foot tall set of steps leading down from the 2^nd story than the porch it would become years later.

Greg had a bit of a lead on me as he ran down the steps, so I thought I’d outsmart him by diving off the top of the porch and landing on him cowboy style like all the westerns show. I timed it just right as he cut right, gave a mighty leap and landed…right on a tomato stake.

Stunned, I found I was not on my brothers back ready to pummel but impaled in the back of my upper right thigh deep enough that I couldn’t pull myself free. The force of my jump jammed the stake even further into the ground. My left foot could barely touch the ground as I stood on my tippy-toes to help relieve the pressure of the stake that was nearly up my ass.

Laurie and Phil had run out the door behind us, always wanting to participate as audience rather than being “in the ring” themselves. Mom was inside the house and they started yelling loudly that I had a stick up my butt and to hurry out before I died.

4 oldest in living room_1 — Such well behaved children. That couch suffered.

Mom tried valiantly, but could not manage to lift me off by herself without doing more damage. This was before 911 and dad was off fighting the war, so she called Aunt Janice, our father’s baby sister that was our chauffeur and 2^nd mother while dad was gone.

Rose lane Janice out front_1 — Aunt Janice in front of our house, act 1966

Janice wasn’t sure that even together, they could pull me up and off the stake high enough, so she called her brother, Uncle Densil, to come over as well. They got there about the same time, and after Densil cracked a few jokes about sticks and asses, stopped laughing and pulled me off the stick with an awful sucking sound.

Then it was off to the emergency room at St. Elizabeth since mom thought it was too deep for her standard nurse treatment of flooding it with peroxide and slapping on a butterfly bandage. When the doc came into the treatment room I’m almost sure I remember Densil saying something like “Doc, the boy got a stick up his ass and needs you to pull it out”.

He put me belly down on his examination table and poked around a bit, making me wince. He gave me several shots of local anesthetic, again making me wince. Everything numbed up back there and he really went to town. Poking and prodding, describing everything he was seeing as he went. “This is pretty deep, I’ll probe to see if I can find any splinters or dirt…this is just fat protruding out of the wound, no muscle, that’s good…oh, what is that…poke, poke, poke”

Meanwhile I’m listening to all of this face down, bare butt open to everyone in the room, unable to see what is going on with my leg. This being my first experience with a local anesthetic, I’m thinking “oh my god, I can’t feel anything, my leg is dying” and expressed that to the Doc.

He reassured me that was a good thing, otherwise I would feel intense pain. I relaxed a bit and assumed playing the role of a morbidly fascinated sub-teenage boy, asking “what did it look like, was it gross, how much blood”, etc., and the Doc played along, describing what he saw and what he was doing.

It felt very weird when I felt the tugging of each stich, yet nothing else. “How many stiches” I asked, trying to determine how much neighborhood street cred I was going to get out of this. “Only 4?” I replied when the Doc told me. I knew I needed to pump those numbers up if I was going to compete with some of the local kids.

The-history-of-the-suture-option2 — Only four stitches?

“It’s not a very big hole” he said, “it is just very deep”. “OK, good”, I thought, “I’ll go with the very deep thing.” After all, mom would have just put a butterfly on it and called it good, and I had a score to settle with little brother.

Ain’t good for nothin’, but put a man six feet in a hole…

This started as just a small part of a story concerning Mamaw and Papaw’s old house on Miami Chapel, but as I kept adding details, it gathered a life of its own and wound up being too long for inclusion, so while waiting for the album I thought I’d release it as a single.

Mamaw and Papaw slept in a bedroom situated at the front of their old house on Miami Chapel. You entered it through big double doors to see the tall four poster bed right in the middle of the room, high off the floor. In my mind it was up that high to keep the mice off of you while you were sleeping, as the old house had plenty of mice running around. When playing hide and seek, we could crawl under it on our knees and still have plenty of headroom.

Just to the right of the bed there was a tall dresser. While I could barely see into the top drawer, one day I was snooping around while everyone was outside and found a tiny little toy cowboy pistol in the top drawer. It looked like a cap gun to me so I pulled it out and drew a bead on a picture on the front wall and pulled the trigger…and just about crapped my pants as it loudly went off in the quiet bedroom…

It, of course, was not a toy, but a small caliber revolver that Papaw kept loaded in his sock drawer for protection. It scared me to death and, in shock, I quickly tossed it back in the drawer, covered it with handkerchiefs and socks and took off running through the house and out the back door as fast as I could.

The adults were all sitting out on the front porch at the time, so as I ran out the back door I lurched to a stop, took some deep breaths, tried to compose myself and, being as nonchalant as I possibly could, started walking around to the front of the house where everyone else was. I ran into my mom about half way, as they were all running around the house to see what had happened.

She asked me what I had been up to and I said the standard answer of all Profitt kids when challenged with being up to no good: “I didn’t do anything”. She just stared at me while a cold sweat broke out all over my little body. She told me I was as white as a ghost and shaking and told me I was not in trouble, I just needed to tell her the truth. Not in trouble? This, to a kid in our family at least, meant you had done something tragically wrong since we might get spanked just for dipping a finger in an icing bowl.

I immediately started crying and trying to get the story out between sobs about how I-found-a-sob-cap-gun-sob-that-sob-wasn’t-a-cap-gun-sob-and-I’m-really-sorry-sob-and-will-never-sob-do-it-again. Dad was rapidly walking up behind her from the front of the house with “that look” on his face.

This was surely an offense that required maximum punishment. I was expecting dad to pull off his belt and fold it or even cut a switch off the huckleberry tree. But mom gave him a look and hand signal to back-off and he stopped in his tracks. Oh lord, I thought, this is so bad they are going to take me to jail and don’t want to leave any switch marks. I resigned myself to wait for the police and take whatever I deserved for being a naughty seven year old. I was going to juvie for sure.

Mom led me back to the scene of the crime and had me re-enact my transgression on humanity. Dad was standing over by the front wall with his pen knife blade poked into the bullet hole like he was a forensic investigator getting the trajectory angle just right. The hole was, in fact, only a few feet above where Papaw was rocking on the front porch. The entire family had been sitting out there.

Still waiting on the cops to arrive and handcuff me, I explained in great detail what had occurred, taking pains to show her how the tiny gun looked just like our cap guns at home. It really did, it was one of those cheap pot-metal looking things that were called Saturday Night Specials back then. Papaw probably picked it up down at the local bar for twenty bucks.

If I may, in defense of my my youthful, dumb-ass self: “The legal definition of a Saturday Night Special, or “junk gun”, usually specifies the materials that used in the manufacture of the gun, targeting zinc castings, low melting point (usually 800 degrees Fahrenheit, powder metallurgy, and other low-cost manufacturing techniques. Nearly all guns made this way are chambered for low-pressure cartridges, such as .22 long, .25 ACP, and .32 ACP . which allows these techniques to provide sufficient strength and desirable weight while still keeping a low cost. The low-strength materials and cheap construction result in poor durability and marginal accuracy at longer ranges, but as most of these guns are designed for use in self-defense, accuracy and durability are not primary design goals.”

Mom explained that, while it did in fact look like our cap guns; A) I should not have been snooping in Papaw’s drawers to begin with. B) That I had nearly shot Papaw sitting on the front porch and could have easily shot any of them or even myself. C) I was now going to have to wait until I was old enough to understand how to safely handle firearms before I would get a gun of my own, or in other words,”You’ll shoot your eye out kid”. (I had been begging for a gun of my own to go hunting with dad forever, which to a seven year old, was about a year. It would be a few more years before that would happen.)

As I sipped some water and calmed down, I could hear Mamaw out in the kitchen giving Papaw an ass-chewing using words I had never heard come out of her mouth before. Hmmm I thought, why is Papaw getting yelled at and I am not getting my hide tanned?

It felt like something out of the Twilight Zone show to me. It was not until later that I found out from mom that Mamaw had been warning him about that gun being loaded with all the grandchildren coming to the house all the time.

It was a hard, scary lesson, and one of those moments in life that never really leave you. I did get a pellet gun the next year, with warnings not to shoot at any living thing and detailed instructions from my drill sergeant father about how to properly handle guns of all descriptions.

While written in a humorous manner, this could have easily been yet another tragic story. They always seem to start with “I didn’t think…” especially concerning improperly handled firearms around children. Please get proper training and treat your firearms with the respect they deserve.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

I have the “We’re Related” app on my iPhone more for fun than anything else. It is an app that compares your family tree with other trees on Ancestry.com to come up with possible matches to famous people.

I say possible because to prove the connection you have to do the work in your tree and back down the other line to see if it is really true. I’ve seen some folks take whatever the app says as gospel, probably due more to the novelty of being connected to a famous person than anything, but I have traced a number of them back and could not find the connection.

A new “connection” pops into the app every so often and I’ll take a look to see if it is one I might pursue a bit deeper. Since my family goes back hundreds of years in America, I’m not too surprised to learn I might be the 10th cousin, 3 times removed, of some notable politician or actor…but you still have to research to prove it.

A few days ago Judy Garland happened to pop up as a 7th cousin, 2x removed. “Hmmm”, I thought, “Judy Garland… might have to dig on this one”, remembering the many, many times that my mother told me Judy was my grandmother’s favorite singer and how Over the Rainbow was her favorite song of all times, which kind of made it her favorite song as well.

“Over the Rainbow” was, of course, written for the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, with Judy in her starring role as Dorothy and became Garland’s signature song. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1939. It was entered in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as music that is “culturally, historically, or artistically significant”.

The Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts ranked it number one on their Songs of the Century list and The American Film Institute named it best movie song on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs list, so it has an impeccable pedigree for being a favorite song.

A major part of the tale from my mother was that Betty Jane, my grandmother, strongly related and empathized with Judy and how she had struggled in her personal life from an early age. The pressures of early stardom affected her physical and mental health from the time she was a teenager.

Into her adulthood, Judy was plagued by alcohol and substance abuse, as well as financial instability; she often owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Her lifelong addiction to drugs and alcohol ultimately led to her death in London from a barbiturate overdose at age 47.

judy-garland-44ed151c8dcd4509c465d198209f073c979e293b — Judy latter in life

Betty Jane had a similar tale…she was born in 1908 and as a one or two year old infant was adopted from St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum in Columbus. She came to her adoptive parents Ada and Millard Brake very sick, with some kind of growth on her neck. Ada named her Bessie after her younger sister that had died at ten years old, but Bessie began using Betty later in life.

St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum, Columbus Ohio

Bessie’s life was tough. Her parents ran a boarding house to try and make ends meet, with Milliard working as a stonemason at the time they adopted her. A few years later he was working for the railroad and fell underneath a moving railcar. Both of his legs were severed and he died from blood loss at the age of 41. Betty Jane was only 9 years old and they went to live with Ada’s 63 year old, widowed father, Albert Benedict.

Married in 1926 at the age of 18 to Carl Clemans, she had Carlotta, her first child, at 19, followed by Gene in 1931 and my mother Ellen in 1934.

In 1929, the Great Crash of Wall Street happened, beginning the Great Depression that lasted 12 long years. Carl had been working as a clerk for the Smith Brothers Hardware Company, but as the Depression dragged on the family was back living with Ada in 1933, who ran a café, with Betty working the café and Carl working the companion gas station.

Carl was back working for the same hardware store by 1935, but he and Betty were legally separated in 1940, Carl having moved out prior to that, according to mom because of Betty’s heavy drinking.

305622_10151260843324695_641268608_n — Carl Clemans

In 1941, as WWII began, Betty had a fourth child, Shirley, with a married railway worker, Marvin Wickersham. By all appearances, Marvin ignored the fact he had a daughter, concentrating on his existing family. With Betty still drinking, my mother was the one that took care of Shirley while Betty worked as a clerk at the Columbus Motor Car Company.

mom and shirley — Ellen and Shirley in Columbus

The divorce with Carl was complete in 1942. Betty married again in 1950, to Wayne Rush. According to my mother he was a good, hard working man, but after years of drinking, Betty died in 1954, at the young age of 46, one year younger than her idol Judy Garland.

Betty and Wayne Rush with her children. Back row Gene, Betty, Wayne. Front row Shirley, Carlotta w son Mike and Ellen

As she died five years before I was born, I never knew my grandmother other than through the stories my mother told. I can surely see why Betty would have felt a deep connection to Judy Garland with their similar struggles in life.

So, I started digging, trying to see if the connection was more than just emotional. As it turns out, the familial connection is from my father’s side, going back four generations to Preston Proffitt’s wife, Martha Wright. Then back three generations of Wright’s to Thomas Wright’s wife Frances Moore, my 7^thGreat Grandmother from Ireland.

Things are a little squishy records-wise after that point, but until I do some deeper digging I’ll stop there, as it makes a nice tale on this St. Patrick’s Day weekend to have an Irish Great Grandmother from the 1600’s connected by a song dreaming about a better life over the rainbow, to my grandmother in the 1900’s who never found her Leprechaun with a pot of gold at the other end.

561543_10151260843259695_1065178540_n — Betty Jane Rush

Death From Above

I never know what memory might happen to pop into my head at any given time. While I used to just ruminate and ponder on them for a few minutes and move on, these days I try to at least make a few notes on my iPhone for a story idea to be developed later.

The older I get the less I am able to run easily through my memory banks with total recall…it takes some more pondering and work to coax the memories back. These playing cards popped into my head the other day and the first thing I did was go to eBay to see if I could find one of the cards to add to my small bookcase of dad’s military mementos. I found they were very rare, but I did find some information I was unaware of.

When dad came back from Vietnam in the summer of 1966 he brought several duffle bags and a foot locker back with him. These were filled with the paraphernalia of a soldier and stored away along with another 20 years worth of soldiering in an area underneath the stairs that was commonly called “The Cave”, as it was not easily accessed and you had to crawl in on your hands and knees.

Naturally, this was attractive to us kids as we could grab a flashlight and secretly dig through all kinds of cool stuff we weren’t supposed to touch. One of the things in the footlocker was a number of playing card decks like the one below. Having skulls, we naturally thought they were very cool and swiped a deck or two to play with. We thought it was weird that some of the decks only had 52 aces of spades, but some were just regular playing cards.

When dad starting finding them spread all over the house we got a spanking and told that the cards were special and we needed to leave them where they were.

We didn’t know why they were special, we just thought they were cards and there were several decks. As we got a little older the story came out that these were “Death Cards” from Vietnam used by soldiers as calling cards and left on dead enemy soldiers to let the Viet Cong know who they were up against. Well, that only made them more desirable since we constantly playing Army all over the neighborhood… so we started leaving a card on enemy neighbor kids as we “killed” them.

Most of my life I just assumed these cards were used by the entire 1st Cavalry Division and were probably still very common. I have learned since the cards were designed by Captain Mozey, the commander of Charlie Company, my dads unit, and were unique to the men in the 8th Cavalry “Jumping Mustangs”, which were an Airborne/Air Assault unit, hence the “Death From Above”.

Some of Charlie Company in Vietnam,
1965-1966. Capt. Mozey is crouching on the left.

Some of Charlie Companies finest.
Vietnam 1965-1966

Here is some historic information I discovered while researching the cards written by retired Sergeant Major Herb Friedman, who researches and collects death cards:

There is a confirmed report that this card was designed by Captain Mozey of C Company, 1st Battalion of the 8th Cavalry Regiment “The Jumping Mustangs” during his Vietnam tour of 1965-1966. A member of the unit told me that:

The calling card was placed on the chest or tucked, slightly, in the shirt pocket. But as I said before we did not use it except to say “We were here.” The actual “Death From Above” saying was a WWII phrase. As of August 1966 the 1st & 2nd of the 8th “Jumping Mustangs” were all carrying a deck of “Death From Above” cards.

Specialist 4 Kevan Mynderup, a former member of “Charlie” Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1968 adds:

I can confirm that the “Death From Above” card was designed by Captain William B Mozey in either late 1965 or early 1966. When Bill took over the company the nickname was changed to “Death From Above” and the unit members got a full deck of the playing cards along with a Black Silk scarf with the “Death From Above” and airborne Skull on it. The phrase was banned in the Battalion Area, so the guys said “DFA” until the brass figured that out. It was an Article 15 offense to say either. The company was broken up at least 2 times because of “DFA” and the cards and scarves disappeared, but returned in 1968 when I was with the company. Only Charlie 1/8th Cavalry was known as “Death From Above” at this time. The other companies had their own nicknames as did all the companies in the 1st Air Cavalry Division.

Although Mozey has been credited with designing the cards, it appears that he had them printed in the United States. One complete deck was found in an old foot locker and the cards turn out to have been printed by: Brown & Bigelow, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.A. Text on the actual deck adds the following information: The Business builders, 55164, A Saxon Industrial Company.

Showing what the Ace of Spades death card looked like. Some of the decks only had 52 of this single card.

Brown & Bigelow of St Paul, Minnesota, was a leading producer of playing cards in the U.S. from the late 1920s to the 1980s. Brown & Bigelow manufactured playing cards under several brand names, as well as novelty and advertising decks. There seems to be no record of them producing Death Cards, so perhaps because of the political situation in the United States the company chose to keep their participation in the production of these cards quiet.

Former Specialist Fourth Class Vic Castle told me that when he arrived in Vietnam as a member of the 1/8th Cavalry on 1 May 1967 they showed him the death cards and black silk scarf and told him their use was prohibited. He says:

The clerk calls out my name. I get in Jeep for short ride to 1/8th Cavalry. There is a large sign that says, “1/8th Cavalry: Airborne, Air Assault, Air Mobile.” Out walks this Sergeant who greets us. I tell him I think there has been a mistake. I haven’t had Jump training. He says, “Don’t worry about it; we don’t give you a damn parachute anyway. He assigns me to A Company. He shows me the Death card and the “Death From Above” black scarf and tells me if I get caught with either it is an Article 15.

He remembers that some unit members were court-martialed while using the cards. He said:

I was told that the men were carving a Cavalry patch on a dead Viet Cong’s chest and stuck the playing card in his mouth. There was a soldier from an engineer outfit there and he took some pictures. He sent them back to his father who apparently was not amused. An investigation followed and then a trial of a First Lieutenant and a buck Sergeant. I think the trial was held in St. Louis and both men were sent to Ft. Leavenworth.

It seems to me that the two men were tried for abusing the body of the dead Viet Cong rather than the use of the death cards. Such charges have occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems perfectly acceptable to shoot a terrorist a dozen times or hack him to death with a bayonet, but abuse the body in any way afterwards and it is a criminal act. How strange.

Curiously, the “Death from Above” death cards reappeared again 30+ years later when American troops were sent to the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm.”

From Ron Doyler:

“There exists another form of these cards. Brown and Bigelow out of Minnesota produced them. William Mosey had them made when he was with the CAV in VN. The cards were done in full decks of regular suits and also ace of spades only. I have two of which were gifts from the Colonel when I was a boy. The cards are all black background with a winged skull and DEATH from ABOVE. The Colonel coined this phrase and had a unit flag also made. If I remember correctly from my conversation with him the director of Apocalypse Now had to gain permission to use this in the film from Col Mosey. Over the years the Col. has given all the cards away.”

I find the background of all this fascinating, as it has been part of my life for over 50 years now. I even wrote “Death From Above” on my climbing helmet back in the 90’s as a sort of karmic dare to the powers that be, as rocks falling from above was one of the more common dangers we encountered while climbing.

While these were just playing cards, I shudder to think how many of mom and dad’s mementos we destroyed over the years when we were kids. After a while all the cards had been lost or destroyed, but there was much more.

There were some cool old suitcases that had stickers of where they had traveled stuffed full of cool stuff they had stashed away, like mom’s old brown army boots, both their uniforms and patches, medals and other hard won awards, post cards and various souvenirs, leaded crystal from Austria, and on and on. We were a half dozen destroying locusts devouring everything in the house. At least the internet allows us to reclaim some some of the bits and pieces of our history.

The summer Bahala Na came to visit.

One fine spring day back in the mid 70’s I heard a terrible racket over at the three story apartment building right behind our house. I looked over towards the parking lot where the noise was coming from, and saw a bunch of kids yelling and screaming and slapping at something on the ground with sticks.

The apartments behind our house where the incident took place…against the building, Just to the left of the telephone pole. This is some other incident in 1972 that I can’t remember.

The noise included a fierce, high-pitched scream which was very strange, so I jumped the back fence to go see exactly what was going on. It turned out to be a raggedy looking gang of neighborhood youngsters, maybe five to 10 years old, complete with dirty bare feet, torn play clothes and Kool-aid rings around their mouths.

They had surrounded a young hawk and were taking turns whacking and poking at it with sticks. The poor hawk was putting up a good fight. He had his back against the apartment building and was clawing and pecking for all he was worth. His feathers were all ruffled, mangled and bent every which direction. Judging from all the feathers on the ground, they had all been at it for a while.

Red Tail Hawk struck by car — Not Bahala Na, he looked much worse than this one that was struck by a car.

I immediately grabbed a stick out of one of the kids hands and, waving it around like a sword, pointing at each one, threatened them all with immediate bodily harm if they didn’t stop at once. There may have been some colorful language used as well.

They started yelling back that the wicked hawk was trying to kill their poor cat and they were just protecting it from certain death from the sharp beak and talons of the hawk. The cat was still sitting there watching, blinking and taking a swipe at the bird now and then from between the kids legs.

I suspect the baby hawk fell or was pushed out of the nest high up on the building and the cat had found it hopping around on the ground, unable to fly yet. The kids had noticed the commotion of the hawk and cat fighting and joined the fight.

As things calmed a bit I explained it was just a poor baby bird that fell out of it’s nest and couldn’t even fly. I told them to guard the bird and keep the cat away from the hawk and then ran to the house to grab some towels and a cardboard box. The kids instantly went from beating the hell out of the bird to becoming a ring of protectors to prevent any further harm.

I figured I could at least keep him free from more harm and maybe let it heal up before letting him go…totally oblivious that it was protected by state and federal laws along with the US Migratory Bird Act.

I arrived back on the scene, tossing towels on top of the bird to try and calm it down. That didn’t work very well…the little guy was fired up and going to go down fighting after the thrashing he had already suffered.

Hawks don’t like to be wrapped in towels

Staying wary of his talons, I tangled him up in the towels and maneuvered the box up close to him and pushed him into the box. I’m pretty sure I saw a disappointed look on the cat’s face as I headed to the house looking like the Pied Piper with the motley gang behind me.

Getting him back home, I carried him into the garage and closed all the doors, as I knew mom would not welcome an angry bird into the house. While we had quite the menagerie over the years, she drew the line at snakes, wild rodents and anything else that might bite her.

We had an old bird cage from the days when we had parakeets, so I managed to dump the wad of towels and bird into the cage and shake him out, using a stick to get his talons out of the towels. He was one pissed off chicken hawk! I didn’t see any bleeding, just a lot of torn up feathers.

Sad Red Tailed Hawk in cage…”Let me free!”

I chased everyone out of the garage to let him calm down and immediately went to the set of Encyclopedia Britannica in the house to read all about him (there was no internet to Google anything back then). From the bright red tail I had already determined he (or she) was a Red Tailed Hawk. I had seen them many times perched in the trees watching for mice in the large grassy fields of White Villa.

I discovered they were frequently used by falconers, as they adapted easily to training. While it sounded very cool to have my own hunting hawk, I decided it was best to return the hawk to the wilds…even if it was a suburban neighborhood filled with houses, apartment buildings and wild gangs of cats and kids.

First though, I had to rehabilitate the poor little thing so he could mend his feathers, fly and fend for himself. Of course, he needed a name, so I named him Bahala Na, from an adventure novel I was reading and fascinated with at the time, I think it was one of Trevanian’s novels of international intrigue, maybe the Eiger Sanction or Loo Sanction.

The novel said Bahala Na was a Filipino saying that meant “Come what may”, which I felt was appropriate at the time. Googling it today, it can be translated to mean “whatever happens, happens,” or “things will turn out fine,” or as “I’ll take care of things.” All of these were perfect for this little guy’s life at the time so I think I chose a pretty good name since I had no idea if he would survive and be released.

I had seen enough National Geographic Specials and other nature shows to know that I shouldn’t turn him into a pet if I was going release him. I didn’t want to be imprinted as his parent. Hoping to keep him in a somewhat wild state, I made a feeding prop out of cardboard and painted a hawk on it, glued some feathers on it with a hole where the beak was so I could use a stick to offer food to him indirectly and not from my hand.

My feeding device was no where near as sophisticated as this puppet for feeding young owls. Needless to say, it did not fool Bahala Na.

Then I had to figure out what the hell I going to feed this dude. I wasn’t going to try trapping field mice every day so I checked the basement freezer to see what might work. We always got a full side of beef from my Aunt Shirley’s farm, there had to be something in there.

There were always odd bits and pieces from internal organs…some were given to our grand parents, as Papaw loved the brains, liver and tongue as well as oxtail soup. But the heart, no one ever seemed to claim that. Perfect! It was huge, could be cut into little bloody strips…just what a hungry little hawk would love to see on his menu!

However, as with most youngsters, Bahala Na turned out to be picky about his food. He refused to eat anything. I would open the cage door with fake daddy bird (the males do most of the hunting while they are in the nest with momma protecting the babies) and he would go nuts, screeching and scrambling to the back of the cage. I would leave a chunk in the cage and leave, but he wouldn’t touch it.

After several days of refusal I thought there might not be any hope for the little guy, but one day I opened the door, stuck the “beak” in with a bit of bloody heart meat on it and he inched forward and took it. Success! He ate it up and screeched for more! I fed him until he stopped feeding and felt like there was hope for the little dude.

What a caged, wild-eyed Red Tail looks like.

I learned later that hawks should only be fed whole animals to maintain their health, including their blood, guts, organs, bones and everything else. They need this yak or more properly “casting” as the casting material cleans their crop before it’s expelled, like an owl pellet.

pelleteyass — A casting from a hawk. Bahala Na only had these when donated roadkill was on the menu.

Luckily I had enlisted the neighborhood kids to be on the prowl for mice, small snakes and other critters for additional chow. It was practically a religious experience for them to bring me roadkill of all descriptions, like they were the family cat bringing a mouse home for master. Today I cringe to think of them scouring the neighborhood killing any small critters they could find.

Melody and Paul in particular were still very young and fascinated by Bahala Na and I would often find them standing in the garage with some kind of offering and a screaming bird begging for dinner. I don’t know for sure, but they might have also been charging their neighborhood friends for a peek to get money for candy.

I then discovered the next issue…food going in meant nastier material coming back out. This consisted of the previously described casting from his crop and something called a mute, which is a poo containing a combination of fecal matter from digested food, urine and urate, which is crystalline uric acid.

mute_beef_wet2 — A hawk poo, called a mute, from a hawk eating beef heart. Bahala Na had big piles of this.

Now, parakeet messes as bad as they are were mostly just a bunch of seeds and petite little seed poos. A hawk eating raw meat leaves a hawk size pile of poo and yak, and if not cleaned up in a timely manner becomes a spa yak-bath for a crazy little hawk to roll and flap around in.

Luckily the cage was one of the types that had a slide-out false bottom for cleaning, although sometimes the yak piles were too large to fit through the narrow slot and I’d have to go in through the door with a heavily gloved hand being pecked at by that sharp beak.

hawk-wallpapers-25501-2723536 — Red Tailed Hawk talons are serious business

Feeding him and cleaning his cage in the mornings and afternoons became a major part of my summer schedule. After a while just opening the side door to the garage meant the dinner bell had rung and Bahala Na would start screeching immediately at the top of his lungs until fake bird daddy fed him.

I fell into a pattern of feeding, watering and cleaning and Bahala Na continued growing, as the main cow heart food supply kept shrinking. His feathers started coming back in and he started making the cage look smaller. I gave up on the cardboard prop after a while and just used a long stick since it didn’t seem like I was fooling him…as soon as I walked into the garage he knew dinner was nigh.

As summer was drawing to a close and fall started I worried a bit as I had read that Red Tails migrated south in the fall, so I wanted to make sure he had time to fly south. he was looking very healthy. He had grown quite large and his feathers were mostly back in place. The cage was growing smaller and messing with his tail feathers.

After school started back up, I discovered dad had been feeding Bahala Na extra meals while I was at school. No wonder his size seemed to be doubling! I caught him hand feeding him like he was a little puppy. He had even bought some meat at the grocery store so he wouldn’t get caught. As much crap as he gave me about keeping the bird in his garage, he was nothing but a big softie after having him there all summer.

Eventually, the day came when it was time to set him free, for better or worse. The family gathered outside as I carried his cage to the back yard. I set the cage down, opened up the door and stepped back to let him leave on his own. He didn’t seem to know what to do at first, but eventually he inched to the door and hopped out.

He flapped his wings around like he was stretching them out and hopped on top of the cage. He flapped a few more times and then managed to fly a few more feet up to a grapevine trellis. He did some more flapping and stretching and then did a big jump off the trellis and off into the sky he went. We all watched him fly until we couldn’t see him anymore and we thought that was it.

The next morning I looked out and he was perched on top of the telephone pole in our back yard, waiting for breakfast. He stuck around for a few more days and suddenly he was gone…until the next spring.

He would come sit on that same spot on the telephone pole every now and then for the next couple of years, probably until he developed his own territory and had a family of his (or her) own as they reach maturity at two years and begin breeding at three years old.

Apartments behind our house when they were being built in the late 60’s. That telephone pole is where Bahala Na would perch on the top of the “T”.

I think of him every time I see a red tail perched high in a tree or sitting on a fence post along the highway.