If Only Jeff Potratz had picked me up! A brief non-sequitur

I saw my Masco friend Gail Potratz today…we worked together over 25 years ago. She was righteously ticked off at me for not giving her an update on, well, everything, but particularly the book and hhiking. Then she said, "This is crazy, a few weeks ago, Jeff (her husband) said he was driving down I-75 and saw a hhiker that looked just like Gerry Boylan, but said that was crazy, he wasn't that nuts, right?" This allowed me the opportunity to push back a bit.

"Jeff saw me on the highway and didn't pick me up? That could have changed the whole trip if he had stopped. Heck, I might have not been picked up by the Flint serial killer!"

Which brings me back to Knoxville. Ah, Knoxville. When I was 19 years old Gerry Reed and I were hitchhiking back from Florida and we stopped to see Helen Hewitt, our St. Mary's friend who moved there her sophomore year in high school. Helen wasn't around that time, but her roommate was and as was the custom in 1971, that was good enough for the roommate to offer us a place to stay. That night we saw our first streaker. Actually, we saw hundreds of streakers running through the middle of the University of Tennessee's campus. It was truly a sight to behold. This was the first of many stops in Knoxville in both my younger years and later on when my daughter Moira was attending Vanderbilt, I'd stop by and visit with Helen. Yet another Knoxville player was Mrs. Hewitt,  who used to pick me up and take me to her house, if Helen wasn't around much. Ken Verla and I were saved by Mrs. Hewitt one night when we were hitchhiking to New Orleans for Mardi Gras to meet up with the PhysTester Car Mike Moore was testing for GM.

This last paragraph reminds me why I love to write stories. There are three or four stories right there that as I look back are just bursting to be told. Me and Verla at Mardi Gras…oh my! Me and Reed living in Miami Beach with an Egyptian who spoke no English and a singing drunk who had a crush on all three of us. Mrs. Hewitt plying us with Scotch to get us to tell us what was really going with us young people. Oh my, oh my!

I'll have to get back to the story tomorrow, but I'm off to play basketball….which is a whole 'nother story! More tomorrow!