Author: Darrell Huckaby

It was damp and cool when I left the house Wednesday morning. By the end of the school day, brisk fall weather had arrived in the North Georgia Piedmont. I set aside all other business and drove straight home to take care of my husbandly duties.

When my lovely wife Lisa got home from work, at dark-thirty, I had a big pot of homemade chili simmering on the stove. And yes, there was hot cornbread, chopped onions and grated cheese to go with it.

Honesty compels me to admit that I wasn’t a big chili eater growing up. In fact, I can’t remember my mother ever serving it at our house. We would have had a steaming hot bowl of vegetable soup on such a day as Wednesday. When I was in college, however, I read a magazine article about legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, the Bluegrass Baron of Basketball. The article revealed that Coach Rupp’s favorite diner was a place just off the UK campus that served spicy chili with purple onions on the side. He was said to have eaten there several times each week.

When the Georgia team, of which I was manager, went to Lexington, I found that diner and had a bowl of the stuff myself. I was hooked, and have been a fan of good chili ever sense.

Whenever Lisa makes chili I think about her first attempt at the dish. We were practically newlyweds and our friends from Valdosta, Ken and Beth Cooper, were coming up for the weekend. The Christmas season was approaching and Beth and Lisa were going to spend an entire Saturday shopping at Lenox Square. I shan’t reveal how Ken and I would spend that particular Saturday, because it isn’t relevant and may serve to incriminate me.

What is relevant is this. When Ken and Beth arrived on Friday evening, Lisa had a huge pot of chili ready for them. She had gotten her recipe from an old church cookbook. I am pretty sure it had been submitted by Larry Laster, an old Porterdale boy who played running back for Auburn in the early ’60s. Lisa was a novice cook understand, and can be forgiven for getting the abbreviations for tablespoons and teaspoons confused.

We all gathered around the table and said grace and I served up the chili. Now I don’t know how much red pepper and how much chili powder Lisa put in that pot, but I know that when Ken Cooper took the first bite of his, sweat broke out all over his face. Always a trooper and always the gentleman, Ken simply took a sip of sweet tea and tried another bite. His eyes bulged out. Steam may have come out of his ears. He reached across the table and grabbed Beth’s arm and said, “Don’t baby; I love you too much.”
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Suffice it to say that we went out for supper that night. On a positive note, Ken’s sinuses stayed clear all winter.

I had a similar experience at a Men’s Club dinner at the Methodist church in Porterdale. I had been invited to speak, on a Monday night, and Jack Rawls was cooking the chili. Mr. Jack was a big man with half an ear on one side of his face. He was a wonderful cook but lived by the principle that too many cooks spoil the broth and wouldn’t let anybody in the kitchen with him while he was at work.

On this particular night Jack finally declared the chili ready and two of the men brought the giant kettle of the delectable dish into the fellowship hall. We eagerly lined up and had our bowls filled with the rich, meaty concoction. When everyone had their bowls filled to the brim we took our places on either side of the long table that had been set up in the big room.

When grace had been said, we all took our long awaited first bites. Jack’s chili was hotter than a twelve-alarm fire. Beads of sweat broke out on my face and, like Ken Cooper had done, I reached for my iced tea. So did every man at the table — except one.

We all looked at one another and laughed and then, as one, looked toward the end of the table where the cook was seated, oblivious to the commotion his chili had caused. There sat Jack Rawls, pocket knife in hand, cutting hot red peppers into his bowl of chili.

The pot I cooked Wednesday night wasn’t of the twelve-alarm variety — and my measurements were accurate. It didn’t clear our sinuses or create the need for us to eat out, but it was good enough to make my children wish they were home enjoying it with us — and that is plenty good enough for me.

The radio has been a staple in American households since the 1920s. In the ’30s, Americans began tuning in on a regular basis for news and entertainment and assurances from the president that prosperity was just around the corner. They listened to “Fibber McGee and Molly” and “Amos and Andy” and FDR’s Fireside Chats. Most Americans learned of the dastardly Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor while listening to their favorite Sunday afternoon radio shows on Dec. 7, 1941.

When I was growing up in Porterdale, we listened to the radio more than we watched television. We had an old Philco model, in the kitchen, with a great big dial, and it played most of the day. WGFS was our station of choice — the “Voice and choice of the Piedmont Area.”

We would listen to the “horn-blowers” — commuters on their way to work who would ride by the station and blow their horns at station owner and morning host Bill Hoffman — while eating breakfast. During the day, on days when someone was home, we would listen to music and the news and the “Bulletin Board” — a feature where local residents could list items and services for sale or trade — and sometimes we would play “Record Giveaway,” a sort of poor man’s trivia game where the first person to call the station with an answer to a question would win a five-pack of 45 records — mostly demos that no one would ever listen to.

We would still be listening to WGFS in the evening at sign off time, when Perry Como would sing the Lord’s Prayer.

Sometimes, of course, we would listen to WSB or WGST and my sister and I might switch the station to WPLO and listen to a little country music or WQXI for some rock ‘n’ roll, but we’d better not let Mama come home from the mill and catch us listening to Elvis, because she didn’t like the boy. She thought he was vulgar.

I wish my mama could have lived to see what rock stars are like today. She’d be done forgave Elvis. Elvis might have shook his pelvis but he never showed it to anyone on live television.

At night, we might’ve listened to the Crackers games on the radio, or I might’ve tried to find a big league game on some static-filled channel coming out of Chicago or Cincinnati. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, the radio was always tuned to WSB because we had to listen to Ed Thilinius and Bill Mundy describe the action from Athens, or wherever else the Georgia Bulldogs might have been playing football. In the winter, we listened to the Kentucky Wildcats play on WHAS out of Louisville. My daddy was an Adolph Rupp man.

Of course we had to be ever-vigilant in case we were instructed to tune our radio to the civil defense station, in the event of nuclear attack.
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By the time my lovely wife Lisa and I had set up housekeeping, television had long supplanted the radio as the primary means of entertainment and communication, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have several in our house. There was an AM-FM tuner in our stereo rack system and we each had a clock radio on our bedside table and we kept a radio on the kitchen counter as well. Bill Hoffman had retired by then, but I liked to listen to Ludlow Porch and all the whackos that called his talk show.

While I wasn’t looking, modern technology had rendered the radio obsolete in our house. There is still a stereo rack system in the basement, but it is in the storage section and not plugged in. The speakers are not attached and I wouldn’t begin to know how to restore it to a functional state. My kids do listen to music, but they have thousands of songs downloaded onto their iPods and plug them into tiny speakers that would dwarf the decibel capacity of our old-fashioned stereos. All of the old boom boxes we used to have were discarded a long time ago.

I quit carrying a headset radio to ball games when Larry Munson retired, so the ones I had up in the closet didn’t have batteries and Lisa did away with our under-the-counter kitchen radio when she had granite countertops installed last spring. The clock on my 28-year-old clock radio still works, but the radio does not.

So there we were — wanting to listen to the Georgia post-game show to see what Mark Richt had to say about the near-fourth quarter collapse and about the post-game tirade Bulldog coach Todd Grantham unleashed on the Vanderbilt coach.

We did what any other grown men would have done: We got in the car and drove around Rockdale County for an hour, listening to the car radio. I’m not sure we ever got satisfactory answers to any of our questions, though.

Sunday morning, I made another startling discovery. Radios are really cheap nowadays, and, for the record — we now have one in every room. Never know when there might be a nuclear attack.

I wonder if anybody still plays “Record Giveaway.”