Renowned hunter, frontiersman, Indian fighter, and Congressman David Crockett of Tennessee, who died fighting for the Liberty of Texas at the Alamo in 1836, was reputed to have begun his hunting exploits by killing a bear at the age of 3.

Davy Crockett’s hunting prowess as a toddler is usually thought to have been only a legend, but as ABC7 News reports:

Dewitt, Ark. A 5-year-old Arkansas County boy killed a black bear Sunday weighing more than 400 pounds.

Tre Merritt, a descendant of Davy Crockett, was hunting with his grandfather Mike Merritt when a black bear happened upon their stand.

“His 10th great-grandfather was Davy Crockett,” Mike Merritt said. “And Davy supposedly killed him a bear when he was three. And Tre is five and really killed a bear. I really doubt if Davy killed one when he was three.”

Mike Merritt was in the stand at the time but said Tre did it all by himself.

“He came in about 40 to 50 yards,” Mike Merritt said of the black bear, “and when he got in the open, I whistled at him and he stopped and I said, ‘Shoot Tre.'”

Tre confirmed his grandfather’s account.

“I was up in the stand and I seen the bear,” Tre Merritt said. “It came from the thicket and it was beside the road and I shot it.”

At first, Mike Merritt didn’t think Tre had hit the bear with his youth rifle.

“I said, ‘Tre, you missed the bear,’ ” Mike Merritt said. “He said, ‘Paw-paw I squeezed the trigger and I didn’t close my eyes. I killed him.”‘

The bear turned out to be 445 pounds; 12 times the weight of Tre. Mike Merritt said tears rolled down his cheeks when he found out his grandson killed the enormous bear.

Tre Merritt’s father said he began teaching his son to shoot when he was just 2 .5 years old, and said Tre killed three deer last year.

The family plans to get a life-sized mount of the bear, but where they will put has yet to be determined.

DeWitt is in rural eastern Arkansas, close to the Mississippi River bottoms and near Stuttgart, the Duck Hunting Capitol of the World.

2:15 KATV video

Let’s hope the kid runs for Congress someday.

(received via email)

1. In the 1950s, where were automobile headlight dimmer switches located?

a. On the floor shift knob
b. On the floor board, to the left of the clutch
c. Next to the horn

2. The bottle top of a Royal Crown Cola bottle had holes in it. For what was it used?

a. Capture lightning bugs
b. To sprinkle clothes before ironing
c. Large salt shaker

3. Why was having milk delivered a problem in northern winters?

a. Cows got cold and wouldn’t produce milk
b. Ice on highways forced delivery by dog sled
c. Milkmen left deliveries outside of front doors and milk would freeze, expanding and pushing up the cardboard bottle top.

4. What was the popular chewing gum named for a game of chance?

a. Blackjack
b. Gin
c. Craps!

5. What method did women use to look as if they were wearing stockings when none were available due to rationing during W.W.II?

a. Suntan
b. Leg painting
c. Wearing slacks

6. What postwar car turned automotive design on its ear when you couldn’t tell whether it was coming or going?

a. Studebaker
b. Nash Metro
c. Tucker

7. Which was a popular candy when you were a kid?

a. Strips of dried peanut butter
b. Chocolate licorice bars
c. Wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside

8. How was Butch wax used?

a. To stiffen a flat-top haircut so it stood up
b. To make floors shiny and prevent scuffing
c. On the wheels of roller skates to prevent rust

9. Before inline skates, how did you keep your roller skates attached to your shoes?

a. With clamps, tightened by a skate key
b. Woven straps that crossed the foot
c. Long pieces of twine

10. As a kid, what was considered the best way to reach a decision?

a. Consider all the facts
b. Ask Mom
c. Eeny-meeny-miney-mo

11. What was the most dreaded disease in the 1940’s?

a. Smallpox
b. AIDS
c. Polio

12. “I’ll be down to get you in a ________, Honey”

a. SUV
b. Taxi
c. Streetcar

13. What was the name of Caroline Kennedy’s pet pony?

a. Old Blue
b. Paint
c. Macaroni

14. What was a Duck-and-Cover Drill?

a. Part of the game of hide and seek
b. What you did when your Mom called you in to do chores
c. Hiding under your desk, and covering your head with your arms in an A-bomb drill

15. What was the name of the Indian Princess on the Howdy Doody show?

a. Princess Summerfallwinterspring
b. Princess Sacajewea
c. Princess Moonshadow

16. What did all the really savvy students do when mimeographed tests were handed out in school?

a. Immediately sniffed the purple ink, as this was believed to get you high
b. Made paper airplanes to see who could sail theirs out the window
c. Wrote another pupil’s name on the top, to avoid their failure

17. Why did your Mom shop in stores that gave Green Stamps with purchases?

a. To keep you out of mischief by licking the backs, which tasted like bubble gum
b. They could be put in special books and redeemed for various household items
c. They were given to the kids to be used as stick-on tattoos

18. Praise the Lord, and pass the ________________?

a. Meatballs
b. Dames
c. Ammunition

19. What was the name of the singing group that made the song “Cabdriver” a hit?

a. The Ink Spots
b. The Supremes
c. The Esquires

20. Who left his heart in San Francisco?

a. Tony Bennett
b. Xavier Cugat
c. George Gershwin

ANSWERS

Sand Picture in a Bottle, Paddle Wheeler Gray Eagle
Andrew Clemens, McGregor, Iowa, c. 1885

Skinner was kind enough to send me the catalogue for their upcoming November 3 & 4 sale of American Furniture & Decorative Arts.

Glancing through it last night, I was simply astonished at the sight of Lot 590.

These unique artworks were apparently created in the late 19th century by a deaf-mute, Andrew Clemens (1852-1894), who sold them as his sole means of support. The colored sands were naturally-occurring, and were collected by the artist in the Pictured Rocks, a mile south of McGregor, Iowa.

Richard J. Langel of the Iowa Geological Survey writes:

To create his sand paintings, Clemens used only a few tools: brushes made from hickory sticks, a curved fish hook stick, and a tiny tin scoop to hold sand. His sand paintings ranged from original designs to reproductions of images from photographs.

Because the majority of the bottles that Clemens used were round-top drug jars, he painted his designs upside down. Clemens inserted the sand using the fish hook stick. The brushes were used to keep the picture straight. No glue was used in the process; the sand was only held in place by pressure from other sand grains. Once a design was completed and the bottle was full, the bottle was sealed with a stopper.

Clemens originally sold his sand paintings in the McGregor grocery store. A small bottle sold for $1; a larger personalized bottle sold for $6-$8. The popularity of his sand paintings increased as travelers and steamboat agents purchased the bottles as souvenirs. Eventually, orders for his bottles became worldwide.

Clemens’ sandbottles are avidly collected as folk art, and now sell for thousands of dollars.

McGregor Sand Artist by Marian Carroll Rischmueller

Wikipedia

The Sandbottles of Andrew Clemens

Andrew “Andreas” Clemens

Cowan’s – Painter Without a Brush

The Barrister, who evidently lives in a good-deal-more-authentic corner of Connecticut than the northern end of Fairfield County where I used to reside, describes the unwritten behavior code prevailing in such portions of New England as still exist.

Where I used to live, there were regular traffic sobriety check points, and the sight of a hunter emerging from the local state game land accompanied by bird dog would cause suburbanite matrons to react with horror.

Sample:

If you buy an old place, you can fix it up but you cannot tear it down. It’s some other family’s homestead. Their history requires respect.

If you play golf, it’s assumed you are a weenie, socially-ambitious, or pretentious – so golf stuff hides in the trunk of the car. Same goes for tennis stuff. There are no golf courses or tennis courts in town. (Nor is there a health club, fast food, or any of that sort of stuff. If you want that, you drive. There is a Costco about 40 minutes away, and well-worth the trip.)

If you have cattle or horses, it’s in your favor. Sheep and chickens less so, but better than nothing. Hunting dogs are OK.

If you are caught gossiping, no one will speak to you again. You are done. So gossip quietly and safely.

If our constabulary knows you, you can DWI as long as you do not hurt anyone.

Whole article.

AP reports that the most famous symbol of American bad taste has been saved from oblivion.

No, it’s not a politician.

The original pink flamingo lawn ornament, the symbol of kitsch whose obituary was nearly written after its central Massachusetts manufacturer went out of business, is rising phoenixlike from the ashes and taking wing to upstate New York.

A manufacturer that bought the copyright and plastic molds for the original version plans to resume production in Westmoreland, N.Y.

HMC International LLC will pick up where Union Products Inc. left off last year when it shuttered its Leominster, Mass., plastics factory after 50 years of flamingo making. …

Mr. Waszkiewicz’s firm expects to resume flamingo production by Labor Day. After Union Products ceased production last June, uncertainty surrounding the fate of the original led aficionados to snap up remaining stock in stores and secondhand Featherstone flamingos, in case those models became extinct. …

The ornaments hit the market in the late 1950s when the color pink was in vogue, and America’s exploding population of suburbanites sought to add flair to their lawns.

But the birds also came to symbolize bad taste, and some residential developments even banned flamingo ornaments from lawns. The bird became a target of pranksters, some of whom swiped the ornaments from front yards, took them on the road, and then sent photos to their owners showing the kidnapped birds in front of sights like the Grand Canyon.

The flamingos typically sell for $10 to $20 for boxed sets of two — one standing nearly 3 feet high with its head held proudly erect, the other bending over as if munching on grass.

Their legs consist of spindly metal rods that can be planted in the ground.

Whole article

I was always more of a glass ball man myself.

Rightwing Prof guest-authoring at Maggie’s Farm has a tribute to West Virginia including discussion of the structure of Appalachian clans, ancestors (he had a really sound great grandmother),

I remember my grandfather saying that the one time she had to be hospitalized, he had to arrange the insurance behind her back because she believed insurance was government aid and she didn’t believe in it. She threw away every Social Security check she got in the mail, which even my very conservative, very Republican grandfather though was crazy.

his youth, and snake-handling preachers.

——————–

I grew up in the mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania, and for more than a decade my wife and I have had a second home in Central Pennsylvania, another hot bed of Scots Irish culture. The locals hurry out to restaurants on September 29th to eat goose. The Michaelmas goose tradition survives there. Just about any statement is commonly appended with a secondary affirmative phrase, “so it is.”

These days, we’re living atop the Blue Ridge, which is so narrow that the combined county and state line meanders in a serpentine line along the ridge top, defined simply by the vagaries of the watershed line. Our house is in Loudoun County, Virginia, but our back yard (and pool) is in Jefferson County, West Virginia.

So exploring West Virginia, which I’ve otherwise only seen briefly in the vicinity of Wheeling on Interstate 70, is definitely on our personal agenda. There must be brook trout in those mountains somewhere. Rightwing Prof’s native soil seems to be just about as far west in West Virginia as you can get.

If this link causes you to go past the actual web-site to an annoying smiley-face page, just hit back, and you return quickly to the desired location.

There are a lot of dumb laws out there.

A Texas State legislator has introduced a bill challenging the traditional claim of New Haven, Connecticut’s Louis’ Lunch to the invention of the hamburger. Representative Betty Brown’s contention that the hamburger was invented in Athens, Texas by a local resident named Fletcher Davis at a luncheonette he operated in the late 1880s is based upon research by a local Texas historian and newspaper columnist named Frank X. Tolbert.

John E. Harmon

If Fletcher Davis invented the hamburger at a luncheonette in Athens, Texas, one might suppose that an invention so successful would have kept that luncheonette in operation.

Despite the passage of time, progress, and New Haven’s inexorable downtown development, Louis’ Lunch remains in business after more than a century. John Harmon’s dismissal of Louis’ clam is not well-reasoned, in my view. Since Louis’ has declined to switch from using their archaic vertical gas broilers, and has refused to switch from using toast to buns, and has refused even to countenance such innovations as ketchup, how can one possibly assume that Louis’s sandwich has ever changed from something else to ground beefsteak?

Boomers can waste their lives and ruin their minds all over again perusing this complete run of Mad Magazine, 600 issues from 1952 to 2006, 17500 pages of drivel, on a single DVD.

Our parents would be truly horrified, if they were still here.

Hat tip to Mark Frauenfelder.

The Boston Globe reports on some cities with more colorful approaches than New York’s.

As the 1,070-pound Waterford crystal ball begins its descent in New York’s Times Square on Sunday night, a few hundred souls in Eastport , Maine, 570 miles to the northeast, will lift their eyes and watch their own harbinger of the New Year: a 22-foot-long sardine.

The sardine is a symbol for the easternmost city in the United States, where canneries were once a booming industry. The canneries are gone, and Eastport is known as an artsy seaside community with galleries and a quaint downtown. But the sardine is a new New Year’s Eve tradition.

“We thought it was intriguing enough, bizarre enough, that it might catch some interest,” said Hugh French , director of Eastport’s Tides Institute & Museum of Art , which will lower the sardine on Sunday night.

Eastport is not alone. Across the country, enterprising civic cheerleaders have come up with all manner of local versions of the Times Square countdown.

In North Carolina, Brasstown drops a live opossum in a cage from the top of a country store.

In Pennsylvania, Lebanon drops a massive bologna.

In Florida, Key West boasts three drops within a mile of one another — a conch shell, a woman dressed as a pirate wench, and a drag queen named Sushi, generally ensconced in a red high-heeled shoe.

Tom Veal, a reprobate I knew at Yale, has penned an impressive elegy, occasioned by the passing of a chap who sounds like a particularly distinguished representative of Sci-Fi fandom. Well worth reading as a testament to the possibilities of American life in the last century.

Jeff Schultz, of the Atlanta-Constitution, reports that interest in the Falcons-Saints game was found coming from one surprising direction… from the direction of Mecca, one is inclined to suggest.

Which leads me to the Falcons-Saints game. (Attention, aspiring journalists: Transitions are for wimps.) The teams meet Monday night in the first game in the Superdome since Hurricane Katrina.

Over 1,000 media credentials have been issued, including, and I’m not making this up, one to Al-Jazeera’s Washington bureau. Can’t wait to read his lead. “Michael Vick and his band of Falcon infidels destroyed other cowards named Saints. But we still don’t like Greg Knapp.”