In the Rearview Mirror

About the Book

The hearts of the people depicted in this book are for the most part as pure and white as the drivcn snow. Well, most of the time anyway. There is little malice in their blunderland, you might say (but probably wouldn’t). Take, for example, my friend Jack Weldon’s well-meaning but flawed odyssey when he guided – much like Moses – his innocent Lubbock High Schoo classmates on their senior trip to Sligo, Texas, a host town that turned out to be sort of a ghost town. The school board members, you see, had mandated that it be a day trip no longer than a certain number of miles from Lubbock because, in their wisdom, they reasoned that an overnighter would surely result in half the class returning home as mothers-to-be. So Jack simply took a compass with a pointy end that he placed on Lubbock, calibrated how far he could go with the circle’s outer extremity to conform to the school board’s edict, and settled on Sligo. It turned out to be a disaster, despite Jack’s having tried his best to avert such an outcome. But you nevertheless must admire him for trying. There are certain other “anticdotes” that came along in Lubbock and elsewhere that are described in somewhat sordid detail in this collection of newspaper columns that I hope will evoke a tear or two – not in sadness but hopefully in joy – as I delve into occasional supercilious silliness while exploring some of life’s foibles that have cropped up along the way. And as you, dear reader, travel life’s byways, please always be cognizant of my old Uncle Ben’s deeply thought-out truism which is, to wit, that “it takes a mighty big dog to weigh a ton.” -- Jerry W. “Slats” Jackson

About the Author

our old hometown hangs heavy in many of my ramblings in this book. It was home to me from the time I “discovered America” back in 1932 until I was induced into Uncle Sam’s Army after graduating from Texas Tech in 1955. Incidentally, those two years in the military were enjoyable ones. We had just quit shooting in Korea and hadn’t resumed the practice until Vietnam. I lucked out by landing at Fort Ord, Calif., for basic training. Nice spot for that duty, just a stone’s throw from such exotic places as Pebble Beach and Cannery Row. (Actually, I wasn’t much of a gung ho soldier. I was lousy on the firing range, where “Maggie’s drawers” – a euphemism for that white flag that another soldier waved when one’s bullet missed not only the bull’s-eye but the entire target – was commonplace in my case. But what you must understand is that the only other gun I had fired previously was a weapon of minimal destruction – a Red Ryder BB gun – so what could you expect?) So they figured that I was a good candidate for clerk-typist school and sent me, following boot camp, to 5th Army Headquarters in Chicago at 51st and Hyde Park streets – hard by Lake Michigan – where I typed up reenlistment assignments to my heart’s content before talking up to my CWO boss that I really, really would like to do my typing in Germany. So he had this friend, CWO Emerick, with the 8th Infantry Division Headquarters at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who he said would soon be “gyroscoping to Germany” (that would make a great song title, eh?) and he prevailed on him to take me in. So I spent that summer of ’56 (a good season to be there) at Carson before switching places with the division in Germany, my promised land that was full of joy and contentment.