A Scarcity of Gazelles
Danny Ryan was my best friend when we were growing up in the small (population 900) town of Wickliffe, on the extreme western tip of Kentucky where the Ohio flows into the Mississippi River.
His father, Bill Ryan, ran the Standard Oil filling station, where many of the town’s characters gathered to outdo each other in the unofficial competition of storytelling and creating colorful expressions.
Bill was one of the best at coming up with short, very funny statements to make a point in such a way as to etch them indelibly on my young brain.
On this particular occasion, Danny and I were no longer children. Danny was going through a period of acquiring some level of sophistication, something we might call “putting on airs.”
Sophistication for Danny included the purchase of an Afghan hound, a beautiful, sleek, longhaired dog you probably see more often in dog shows than in dog houses.
“Son,” Bill told him, “I just can’t understand why you would go out and buy something as useless as an Afghan hound when you could have bought a Chesapeake Bay retriever or a Lab that you could take duck hunting.”
“But dad,” Danny defended, “Afghans aren’t useless. Why, they use them in Africa to hunt gazelles.”
“Well son, that’s wonderful,” Bill growled at Danny, “but sometimes I go two, maybe three days and not see a gazelle.”
When Danny asked for requests
Danny Ryan and I were teenagers in the early days of rock and roll, and at the beginning of what would later be called soul music.
I tried to play guitar, with limited success, but knew better than to try to sing. My talent as a singer ranks right up near the top of the worst singing voices ever.
Danny, meanwhile, got a ukulele.
His voice wasn’t much better than mine, but either he didn’t realize that or he capitalized on it in the ongoing effort to draw out responses from his dad, Bill Ryan, who ran the Standard Oil station in Wickliffe.
Danny hung out at the station and worked occasionally, particularly on weekends and during the summer.
I just hung out there, enjoying Danny’s company and loving the stories that Bill and others of his age – who also hung out at the station – told.
Danny usually had the ukulele with him, and his playing and singing consistently drew grimaces and other responses from Bill.
Danny was going through a stage when he would aggravate his dad by referring to him as “Dad babe.”
On this particular day, Danny managed to evoke a classic Bill Ryan response.
Having caused several minutes of pain and grimace with his playing and singing, Danny baited Bill with the question: “Hey Dad babe, whadaya want me to play.”
Bill’s three word answer summed it all up:
“Play dead son.”
It’s easy to be humble if you’re rooted in … well, read on
Not that I have any special justification for feeling better than anyone else, but from time to time my head has increased a couple of cap sizes and I feel pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished over the years.
But before I’m in real danger of floating too far off the ground, Bill Ryan brings me down to earth.
Yes, Bill has been dead for many years, but his sayings, his attitude, his creativity remain with me. And I’m about to tell you what he said one day that keeps me rooted firmly in who I am and where I came from.
If you’re a regular visitor to this site you’ve read some stories about Bill and his son, Danny, who was my best friend growing up.
Bill ran the Standard Oil filling station in town. He achieved some small amount of fame when one of the newspapers carried a story about Ike, Bill and Danny’s Chesapeake Bay retriever, who spent days at the station.
At a certain time each day, Bill would send Ike to the post office. Someone at the post office would open the back door and hand Bill’s mail to Ike, who would fetch it back to the station.
I have a few hunting stories involving Ike, and maybe I’ll tell some of them one of these days.
But this isn’t an Ike story.
Bill had business with the Standard Oil distributor in Paducah one day and he let Danny and me ride with him.
We were met by a receptionist or secretary. In retrospect, I think her assignment was to do her best to keep people from intruding on the boss. She was there to keep out the riff raff.
Bill told her he was there to see the distributor.
He had to prove his worthiness before she would let him pass.
“Do you have an appointment?” “What is the nature of your business?” “Is he expecting you?”
Those were the type of questions she asked before she would allow Bill to pass.
Finally, Bill had established the proper level of credibility and the inquisitor accepted the fact that he should be allowed into the executive area.
“And whom shall I say is calling?” was her final question.
I still regard what Bill said as one of the great answers of all time:
“Bill Ryan, just as common as cat shit.”
Today, if I discover myself feeling a little uppity, I think about that answer and what it means on many different levels.
You could regard it as a sarcastic, impatient response to an unnecessary level of interrogation.
I prefer to regard it as a reflection of a person who knows who he is, is satisfied with knowing and being that person, and who doesn’t need a façade that might suggest anything beyond that.
What you see is what you get.
In my experience, it’s hard not to be humble when you know you’re firmly rooted in a litter box.
The gag that gagged (or Danny and the puke pad)
Danny Ryan and I were in high school, so that places this story in the late 1950s or early ‘60s.
It takes place – where else – in Bill Ryan’s Standard Oil gas station.
On this particular day, at this particular time, Bill wasn’t there. Danny was running the station and I was there, too.
A couple of days earlier, Danny bought a puke pad. It was made of rubber or plastic, perhaps six inches in diameter, and looked very realistic, just as if someone had lost his or her dinner.
There was a water fountain inside the station and Danny thought it would make a great gag to put the pad in the bottom of the fountain.
It wasn’t long before one of the regulars showed up. I wish I could remember who it was but while I can remember the event I can’t remember the person.
I don’t think Danny will be any help on this one. Until I mentioned it in an e-mail a couple of days ago, he had forgotten the event.
Anyway, one of the regulars showed up and it wasn’t long before he caught a glimpse of the pad in the fountain.
“Damn, someone threw up in the water fountain,” he informed us.
Danny walked over and looked at it as if he wasn’t aware.
He backed up quickly and made some gagging sounds.
“You need to clean that up,” the man, whose name I can’t for the life of me remember, told Danny.
“I can’t,” Danny said. “It makes me sick to look at it. If I tried to clean that up I would wind up vomiting myself. Can you do it?”
Grumbling and with great reluctance, he said he would.
He got a paper towel, approached the fountain with some trepidation, and gingerly reached out toward the pad.
When he got the towel in place, he tried to scoop up some. The entire pad moved at that time of course, and as he kept trying to scoop it, he raised one side of the pad completely off the bottom of the fountain.
“My God, how long has this been in here!” he demanded between the gagging noises he was making. “It’s set so long that it has turned solid!”
That did it. Danny and I cracked up at that point.
The visitor realized what was going on and he wasn’t any too happy with us, but such was life at Bill Ryan’s station.
Three Tales from Bill Ryan’s Station
(Note: Tom Ryan – we called him Tommy when we were growing up – is Danny Ryan’s brother. They are the sons of Bill Ryan, who ran the Standard Oil station in Wickliffe, which is the source of several stories on this site. Danny was my best friend. Tom was younger, and quieter. I felt like he was more like his mother, Mary Ryan, while Danny was more like Bill. Tom sent these three stories. He lives in Jackson, Tenn.)
Breaking Even
Here's one of dad's classic true stories.
It was a slow day in Wickliffe at dad’s station.
A tourist pulled up to the service station. He said he didn’t need any gas, which, of course, was not that unusual.
He used the bathroom and then took a long drink of water from the fountain. Then, he pulled out a dollar and asked for change, and, as usual, dad obliged.
The tourist then asked dad "How's business?"
Dad replied, "Well, I'm swapping ice water for piss and breaking even on change. I guess I'm doing all right."
Sultans of Swat
While loafing some at the station during the summer when I was young, I often killed time by swatting the flies that continually entered through the open door and side windows. I became very adept at it.
Good-natured Bobo Dunn worked many years for dad before getting a good city job with the Wickliffe Water Department.
One early morning in late summer when he had some free time, he washed all the windows in the station and that was not an easy task.
I just happened to visit the station that day and smeared a few dozen flies after Bobo had gone home.
The next morning, he asked dad, "What in the world happened to my clean windows?"
Fortunately, Bobo and dad shrugged it off and Danny and I resumed our endless swatting soon afterwards.
Your Oil’s Fine but Your Radiator’s a Quart Low
Until I became a teenager, I literally played some type of ball daily – wiffle ball, cork ball, and lemon ball (some Wickliffe kid had to have invented that game using the discarded plastic lemons that held lemon juice in the 1960s).
So, it was with great sadness that I was forced by dad to start helping him and Danny at the station after school and on Saturdays.
My mechanical abilities were pitiful (explains why I went into accounting), but I at least learned some basics.
Back in those days many tourists requested that we not only check the oil but also the radiator, a task we hated since you could easily get burned. Often, the end result was that a bunch of antifreeze simply got spewed onto the drive.
One day I suppose I had some cobwebs from getting up early which is why I foolishly poured a can of motor oil or transmission fluid (I can't remember which) into a tourist's radiator.
The man was rightfully livid, but I had no solution for him so I phoned dad at home, and he somehow pacified the man.
I do recall that the man wanted me fired (which thrilled me but wasn't going to happen because dad enjoyed my services at a very low pay rate) and that dad learned from local mechanic Willie Garner that only one can of the fluid would not hurt and might even help the radiator.
If an Asylum, the Inmates Ran It“If they surrounded Wickliffe with walls, it would be an asylum,” Red Harrington once said, according to Danny Ryan as relayed to me by his brother Tommy Ryan. Danny’s too busy hunting to send his own memories this time of year.
And Red would have been one of the people who would have helped it deserve that status.
Red was one of the regulars you would find at Bill Ryan’s Standard Oil station in Wickliffe back in Danny’s, Tommy’s and my growing-up years.
Red coughed a lot. I heard people say he had TB, but I don’t know if that’s true. Later, when I had my first TB skin test and it showed positive, folks said that may have been because I was around Red. Eventually I turned down the skin tests because they always were positive. I told the medical folks just give me an X-ray if they wanted to check me.
The X-rays always showed that I was okay.
Bill Ryan always had plenty of stories about Red, few of which I remember.
One was about the time Red was coming back from Cairo after having purchased a pint or half-pint of whatever it was he was drinking. Often after a trip to Cairo, he would turn left off the highway onto the gravel road that led to Prairie Lake in the river bottoms. He’d go down there, relax a little, have a nip or two.
When he started to turn left on this particular day, a semi truck roared around him from behind, nearly clipping Red’s car.
Unnerved by this close brush with certain death, Red was telling about it at Bill’s station.
“Well Red, why didn’t you give a turn signal?” the people there kidded him.
“Turn signal hell,” he retorted. “I did give one. But if I had the sun and the moon hanging back there for signals, the sunuvabitch would have still tried to run over me!”
Red and Bill were duck hunting one day in the blind across from Bill’s cabin on Prairie Lake, Tommy Ryan remembers.
Bill – probably with the help of others – would put out a spread of decoys in front of the blind at the start of duck season and leave them there all season. Danny and I enjoyed many a hunt out of that blind.
The day of this story was a clear, sunny day, which often was the condition that led to the greatest hunting success from that particular spot.
Red had one of the coughing attacks that seemed to go on and on without relief.
“Dad bluntly told him,” Tommy says, “ ‘Red, I don't know how we're ever going to get a duck in here with you coughing like that.’ "
Red managed to find enough time between coughs to come back with one of his typical quick retorts, this one aimed at Bill’s thick eyeglasses: "Yeah, and with your eyeglasses shining off the sun like carbide lights, I don't know how in the hell we can get a duck in here, either.”
If any of you readers are too young or too sheltered to know about carbide lights, they were used by miners before battery-powered lights came along, and they also were a favorite of coon hunters. People wore them on hats made for that purpose.
They would put some pellets of calcium carbide into the tank and add a little water. That produces acetylene. The gas could be lighted, usually with a wheel sort of like you’d see on a cigarette lighter. It produced sparks and the gas “whoofed” into flame.
Tommy shared these memories of Red:
“Red was one of my favorite service station loafers because he knew how to talk to young kids, and had unique, humorously sarcastic comments on numerous topics and wasn’t bashful about speaking them with his twangy voice.
“He was generally in a good mood despite laboring with a medical condition that caused extremely heavy breathing, coughing and wheezing. I wish I knew more about his earlier life, though I did hear he was once a very good local baseball pitcher.
“He could be a ‘vicious’ tease and one day he attacked my favorite Cardinal, Stan Musial.
“ ‘Is that old man still playing?’ he teased. Naturally, that got to me.
“Dad overheard and grinned like a Cheshire cat since he loved to listen to Red. Stan was admittedly playing fewer games late in his career, but of course, I defended him.
Red said, ‘One of these days he'll just fall apart limb by limb chasing a fly ball!’
“On the other hand, Red could be kind. One time he had a block of hickory wood and he whittled me a monkey with its tail in its mouth. I still have it.”
It wasn’t global, but it was warming(Note: Thanks to Danny Ryan for providing this story.)
Regarding my story of how girls managed to get in the way of ping pong and other activities (Story posted in “My Personal Favorites category on this website), Danny Ryan writes, “You sure hit on some good memories of the past with your latest story. I still try to relive the past with the squirrel season that recently opened. I went once this opening weekend and had to hunt four hours on our old hunting grounds to get the limit of six. It has been very hot lately and it was very hot this weekend; I only heard one other hunter shoot his gun.”
The hunting grounds Danny mentioned is a piece of land at the head end of Prairie Lake outside Wickliffe. Danny’s father, Bill Ryan, bought it when Danny and I were young. Bill built a dam to create a small, shallow lake on the property. It was a good place to hunt squirrels. When Bill died, I believe Danny and his brother Tommy inherited it.
Danny says the hot spell he mentioned reminded him of a story from about 50 years ago. As many of out favorite stories, this one took place in the Standard Oil gas station that Bill Ryan operated for as long as I knew him.
The Standard station had a couple of things that stand out in my memories. One was the Coke machine. You put a nickel in it and pushed down on a handle, which caused the mechanism inside the machine to rotate, putting a bottle into alignment with the slot. You could grab the bottle and pull it out.
The other was a metal coal stove that sat behind Bill’s desk. In the winter, when the coal was trying to drive out the Ballard County cold, it often glowed a cheery, cherry red. That glowing stove was a comfort when you walked inside on a cold day.
Danny writes, “You may remember that my dad went to bed early and got up early so that he could read for awhile and then open the service station a little before daylight.”
This day started out like any other, with Bill getting up, reading, and then driving to the station.
“On this particular morning,” Danny writes, “Buck Graves came in right after daylight and lit a match to light a cigarette. Buck did his usual trick of not putting the match out; instead, he pushed the burning match through a hole in the door of the coal stove.”
So far, this would be a morning much like any other.
But …
“Unknown to Buck, the Lance peanut man had been stuffing empty peanut and cracker boxes in the stove all summer as he filled the peanut and cracker jars.”
So what happens when burning match meets up with peanut boxes inside a stove?
“Dad said the cardboard caught on fire,” Danny writes. “The fire was hot enough that it caused the stove to go from red hot to white hot.”
A white hot stove isn’t a comforting thing on an already hot Ballard County morning, but within a few minutes, even though it was still putting out plenty of heat, the stove had gone back to its normal color.
Buck Graves left the station, maybe because it was hotter inside than outside. But then Zack Dennis came in a few minutes later (about 15 minutes after daylight) and took up his normal squatting position next to the north wall a few feet from the stove.
“The sweat started pouring from Zack's forehead,” Danny writes, obviously savoring the story his father told him all those years ago. “Zack didn't realize that most of the heat was coming from the stove.”
Sweating so profusely with daylight barely a done deal, Danny reports, “Zack looked over at dad and said, ‘By golly Ryan, it's going to be a hot one today!!’”
I can almost hear Bill chuckling as the story is retold.
Colorful and Off-Colorful Sayings
You’ve heard people say, “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention.” That’s been said so much that it’s a cliché. People in Ballard County where and when I grew up didn’t need clichés. The culture demanded originality.
For instance, the people lounging – that’s a polite term for loafing – around Bill Ryan’s service station in Wickliffe were taking turns bemoaning their respective states of finance. “Can’t pay attention” would not have been a part of this discussion in Wickliffe. Too trite.
Bill topped them all with this description of how bad off he was: “If turkey was selling for a nickel a pound, I couldn’t kiss a hummin’bird’s ass.”
Someone described the soil in the river bottoms after the backwater went down as being “as rich as three feet up a bull’s ass.”
You’ll notice, if you haven’t already, that many of the colorful/off-colorful statements involve various bodily functions and body parts.
Tim Hughes, son of Urban Hughes about whom the tales assume mythical proportions, passed along these. (He passed along several more, too, but some were a bit too bold for this site.):
Someone describing a cross-eyed person: "He's a little tangle-eyed. I think he was born in the middle of the week lookin’ both ways for Sunday."
Regarding bad luck, Tim heard this from a black woman who was shopping in his father’s store: "I'm so far down that bottom looks like up."
Tim says he first heard this saying from a friend referring to some young lady walking down the sidewalk: "Her ass looks like two pipe stems stuck in a pumpkin."
Banter from Bill Ryan's service station (and this is one of my laugh-out-loud favorites): "Did you just fart?” “Hell yes, you don't think I smell that way all the time, do ya."
In reference to the deceased at a funeral: "Putting a suit on that old fart is like installing an elevator in an outhouse."
Red Harrington (another character about whom the tales abound) while taking a leak at Prairie Lake in the river bottoms, and speaking to his manhood: "Well old pal, we've had a lot of good times together, but I've just outlived ya."
On the subject of ugliness: “His/Her face looks like it could have worn out three bodies. Has enough wrinkles to hold a week's rain.”
Here are a couple from my sister Jeanne:
"If he had to haul ass, he would have to make two trips."
"I'm so hungry that when I swallow spit, my stomach says thank you."
And here’s one from Tommy Ryan, quoting Joe Wear of the Rudd-Wear Drug Store: "Son, there's more horses asses in this world than there are horses."
My good friend Danny Ryan (Tommy's brother) has been busy cleaning up after the big ice storm that hit in January, while also managing to do a little fishing, but he finally spared a few minutes to call and contribute some more color:
Danny passes along this statement by Urban Hughes, when Joe Garrett was walking past Bill Ryan's station. Joe was my cousin George Crice's grandfather and had a nose of prodigious proportions. As Mr. Garrett walked by, Urban turned to Danny, "How would you like to have his nose full of nickels?"
It was a dry summer and farmers were congregating in and around Bill Ryan's station, praying for rain, wondering aloud when it would rain, etc. Tired of all the talk, Red Harrington said, "I hope they get so much rain that the knob on the courthouse door looks like a fishing cork."
It was a bad spring for mosquitoes. Gabe Cullen (I believe that's who Danny said it was) was covered up by them down in the river bottoms. Someone said he should swat them away. "Aw, I'll just leave them alone. They'll get their fill and leave."
Here are a couple more Danny tells on Red Harrington.
Reworking the phrase that someone is high, wide and handsome, Red said of a man rather large in the rear, "He's high, wide and ass-some."
Bill Ryan and Homer Lee Elliott were bragging on each other for going without a drink. Homer Lee said he hadn't had a drink in a week. Bill said now that he thought about it, he hadn't had one in two or three weeks. Red Harrington ended that brag session: "I turned down one drink in my life and I've been sorry ever since."
Various Stories Heard at Bill Ryan’s Station
What a wonderful place Bill Ryan’s Standard Oil station was. You could count on at least a couple of folks hanging out, swapping stories, just about any time. That story-telling culture was a big influence on a lot of folks of my generation.
I’ve included several of my favorite Bill Ryan’s station stories on this site, and today I’ll add a group of a few short ones I heard there around 50 years ago.
Everett Hughes
One of the locals among the hangers-on at the station was Everett Hughes.
It wasn’t unusual for a few wasps to find their way inside Bill’s cabin on Prairie Lake, so one of the staples was a can of Raid or Black Flag wasp spray.
Everett and Bill had driven Bill’s late-50 Dodge truck into the bottoms on this particular day to do something at the cabin.
Sure enough, they were greeted by wasps.
Everett said he would get rid of them, so he grabbed the can of bug spray, and chased around the cabin for a few seconds until one of the wasps had settled down into a place where he could spray it effectively.
He aimed the wasp spray carefully, and mashed the spray button.
Trouble was, he hadn’t bothered to make sure the nozzle was pointing toward the wasp. It didn’t take him more than a second or two to realize that it was aimed directly at his face. Had the wasp been sitting on his nose, it would have received a lethal dose.
Another story with Everett Hughes was sent to me by Bill’s son, Tommy. Bill took Everett, Tommy and Bill’s other son, Danny, to St. Louis to watch a Cardinals’ baseball game.
They stopped at a restaurant for dinner before the game.
Everett either wasn’t paying attention or he had some vision trouble during dinner because when he reached for a cracker, he grabbed a pat of butter instead and got it all over his fingers.
A hard-core Cardinals’ fan (as were many of the people in our small town), during the game Everett was laying into the home plate umpire for his balls and strikes calls.
Finally Bill couldn’t hold it any longer. He turned to Everett, “Just how in the hell is it that you can see those home plate corners better than the ump when you couldn’t even tell a pat of butter from a cracker!”
Ned Rock
Ned Rock, who I think may have been a Wickliffe character who tended to drink more than he should, and do so on a pretty regular schedule, came to the rescue in this story.
Wickliffe’s town marshal was attempting to arrest a man one afternoon at the Gulf station across the street from Bill’s station. That station was run by Richard Parham, known as Apple Dick.
The perpetrator (I don’t know what he was perpetrating) was trying to grab the marshal’s pistol. Both men were struggling for the gun when Ned Rock heroically staggered out of the Gulf station.
Without hesitation, he reached down, grabbed the perp’s testicles (through his pants, of course) and squeezed for all he was worth.
Not only did the bad guy let go of the gun, he immediately put his hands into the air and surrendered.
That incident came to be known around town as “Ned Rock and His Cod Lock.”
B. Allie Hall
B. Allie Hall was another Wickliffe resident who was featured in quite a few stories.
He achieved a certain degree of fame for working anonymously to acquire property on behalf of the Westvaco Corporation, which built a paper mill between Wickliffe and Bardwell, and which remains today as one of the county’s main employers, although under a different name.
B. Allie was a surveyor and he also cruised timber. To cruise timber is to take various measurements and then come up with an estimate of the amount of timber in a given forest. This helps set a value on the worth of the timber.
B. Allie and Bill were in the bottoms for something, possibly hunting squirrels. When it was time to go back to their vehicle, they had a disagreement on which way to go.
B. Allie declared that he had cruised timber in these woods and knew they had to go that way.
“Well by God, B. Allie,” Bill replied, “yes, you can get back going that way. Trouble is, you have to walk all the way around the world to do it!”
When my uncle Billy Bob Crice was elected sheriff of Ballard County not long after he had been drafted into the army, he hired B. Allie as his chief deputy to run the sheriff’s office until Billy Bob served out his term.
When Billy Bob installed the county’s first two-way radio, B. Allie frequently was the operator of the base unit in the sheriff’s office.
B. Allie had a huge, booming voice. When he used the radio, he took full advantage of his voice.
Folks laughed that he didn’t need a radio. Billy Bob could have heard that voice anywhere in the county.
A good reason to go armed
June 10, 2010
Tot Waldon told me this story from Bill Ryan’s Service Station tonight while we were eating at Smokey D’s Family Restaurant in Bandana.
The way Tot heard the story, Pug Hammett of Wickliffe was running for sheriff of Ballard County. This was back in the days when voters marked an X in pencil beside the name of the candidate they wanted to vote for.
Ballot boxes had to be brought from each precinct to the courthouse at Wickliffe and the ballots were counted one at a time. Sometimes – in fact, usually – the process took several hours and candidates and voters tended to get restless.
For some reason, counting was delayed on this night.
Determined that no one would get a chance to stuff a ballot box, Pug – according to the story – went home, got a shotgun and came back to the courthouse where he spent the night guarding the ballot boxes.
When the votes finally were counted, Pug had received only 75 votes.
He took his shotgun, went home, put down the shotgun, picked up a pistol and either stuck it in a holster or put it in his pants.
When Pug and pistol showed up at Bill Ryan’s station, the regulars who gathered there expressed their regrets at the paltry number of votes he had received, and they asked him why he was carrying the pistol.
“Hell, boys, when you ain’t go any more friends than I have, you need to go armed,” Pug is supposed to have said.
Red Harrington and the salty dog
July 11, 2011
I’ve been holding this story in the “to write” folder for about a year.
I’m moved to write it today after Rick Harrington left an entry in the Guestbook on this site. You can go to the Guestbook and read what he wrote, but I’ll quote most of it before I’m finished.
Rick’s grandfather was Red Harrington of Wickliffe, one of the town’s main characters. If you set up a hierarchy of characterness among the Wickliffe residents back in the 1950s when I was growing up there, Red would be in the top tier along with such other notables as Bill Ryan, Urban Hughes, Archie Wear and a few others.
You can read another story about Red in this section of the website.
The title of that one is, “If an asylum, the inmates ran it.”
Rick writes in the Guestbook, “We've communicated through Facebook but this is my first visit to your website. As always, I enjoy reading about my Granddaddy (Red) as he passed away when I was 11. I never got to hear these ‘good’ stories, but I always heard he was quite a character.”
In the “asylum” story, Tommy Ryan mentions that he believes Red was quite a baseball pitcher in the local leagues.
Rick confirms this. “You're correct that he was a baseball pitcher. My grandmother had a team picture (that has since been lost) of the Cairo (Illinois) baseball team. He also was a streetcar conductor in Cairo and he worked for the Federal Barge Line. You could always recognize the Federal boats on the river because they were yellow.”
I also mentioned in the “asylum” story that people said Red had tuberculosis. Rick says, “And for the sake of accuracy, it was emphysema, not TB, which is what ultimately killed him. He always kept a can of tobacco and his pipe and OCB rolling papers handy which I'm sure didn't help his cause very much.”
Tommy Ryan mentioned that he still has a treasured keepsake that Red whittled for him, a monkey with its tail in its mouth. Red whittled it from a block of hickory wood.
Rick writes, “I also have some of his monkeys with their tails in their mouths. Mine are hollowed-out peach pits with the outer perimeter unbroken. He hung them from a chain, charm-bracelet style.”
He concludes his entry, “Thanks again for writing this all down. My grown daughters are amazed when I tell them there were three grocery stores, two drug stores, and a couple of restaurants ‘uptown’ when I grew up there. They also get a real kick hearing stories about people they only see in old photo albums.”
That’s enough background for this story, the basics of which were relayed to me by my good friend Danny Ryan, Tommy’s brother. Their father, Bill Ryan, ran the Standard Oil station in Wickliffe which was something like the equivalent of today’s comedy clubs except there was no charge, the comics were all local residents, and the stories had at least some basis in fact.
Red’s wife, Agnes – the grandmother Rick mentions above – raised roses at their house, which I recall being on the right side of the road going up the hill toward the old Wickliffe School, just past what is now the Wickliffe City Park.
A neighborhood dog, or perhaps it was a stray, decided that the roses were his personal commode, and he started leaving doggy landmines in the roses.
Red built a wire cage to go around the flowers.
According to Danny Ryan, the way the story was told at his dad’s gas station, “The dog worked his ass through the cage, planted one turd and then crossed it with another, making a perfect X.”
Red couldn’t tolerate that type of insult to his wife and her roses.
Because the cage wasn’t a sufficient deterrent, Red loaded a shotgun shell with salt.
The next time the dog came around to sign his name with the X, Red took aim and shot the dog directly in the offending part of its anatomy.
Danny reports, “The dog hit ground in middle of the street, took a right on Sixth, and was last seen dragging his ass in sand to cool it off.”
A boxer shorts tale about Harvey Brown
July 24, 2011
In my memories, Bill Ryan is either sitting at the desk in the Standard Oil station in Wickliffe or he’s sitting on the couch in boxer shorts and a T-shirt at his house.
I’m sure I saw him in other settings, but those are the ones I remember.
I was visiting with him one day in October 1977, and he told this story. I’ll call it a boxer shorts story because that’s what he was wearing at the time.
This is about Harvey Brown of Wickliffe, who folks also called Radio Brown.
Here’s how Bill told the story:
“I was down one time at Fred Byassee’s barber shop, you know, where it burned there. It’s been built back, about where Bill Allen’s is now.
“Harvey was in there, and he was just talking and his voice was vibrating all over the ceiling and walls (Bill chuckled at this point), making your eardrums ring.
“Harvey’s wife, Pearl, is dead now. You know, she did all the work and Harvey did the talking.
“They fished together, trotlined down here in the winter you know. They would bait the line with worms, and Pearl would do the baiting in that ice, and Harvey would sit back with a lard can and he’d have a fire built in there. He’d break off buckbrush as he’d go along and stoke his fire."
(Imitating Harvey’s voice, Bill went on): “Pearl, row on, stir it up, I’m freezin’ to death!”
“There was one time they caught about 60 or 70 pounds, and one of the fish was about 30 pounds. They lived over there on the street where Haden Owens lived. Red Poole lived up the street from him.”
(Bill mimicked Harvey’s voice again): “Come out here Red, let me show you somethin’. We hit the jackpot.”
“Pearl was skinning them and Red Poole said, ‘Pearl’ll be all afternoon cleaning those fish!’ ”
(Imitating Harvey again, Bill continued): “Naw, she better not be. We gotta get back down there and get them lines fixed!”
“Then they’d peddle the fish, you know, and Pearl would weigh them out and then Harvey’d reach other there – he took all the money in. Poor Pearl did all the work.”
Watch what happens next
Oct. 11, 2011
Before he opened the Wickliffe, Kentucky, Institute for Oddballs, Occasional Nippers, and Other Assorted Characters and Tellersof Tales – otherwise known as the Standard Oil station – Bill Ryan ran or worked at a gas station in the nearby town of Barlow.
He left that station in 1943 when Standard Oil got in touch with him and offered to let him lease the station in Wickliffe. It was during his years at Wickliffe that I became steeped in the culture of storytelling as practiced so hilariously within the walls of that station.
Before Bill came to Wickliffe, apparently the station at Barlow was a magnet for the same sorts of characters. As I think about it, I have to conclude that it must have been Bill that was the magnet since he attracted folks to both stations.
In Barlow, Bill was best friends with Neal Parsons, whose house was not far from the station. Parsons had a business where he made leather watch bands and other leather products. He shipped all across the country, and to foreign lands as well.
A young Dan Price in Barlow was a frequent visitor to the service station. You know it was a long while ago because Dan Price is 90 years old now.
Neal had a watch repair business too.He was proud of his work and told someone in later years, “When I fixed somebody's watch, I FIXED it!” A lot of Ballard Countians would have vouched for that.
One day while Dan Price was in the station, Neal came over to visit. Bill asked him if he had the time. Neal pulled out a pocket watch, still in its case, and told Bill what time it was.
Bill was favorably impressed by the watch and expressed interest in buying it.
Neal gave a sales pitch about the watch being “the finest money can buy, one of his personal favorites, etc.”
Bill took the watch, looked at it this way, turned it and looked at it that way, and then raised his arm and smashed the watch on the floor. Pieces flew everywhere.
Bill and Neal started cussing and arguing about it, and worked themselves into a rage. Eventually Neal went off in a huff.
Some 60 years later, Dan Price was visiting Parsons in a nursing home. The watch incident had made such an impression on him that he mentioned it. Parsons chuckled and told Dan that he and Bill had planned that incident to pull in front of Dan.
Bill and Neal had worked up the elaborate scheme in advance. Neal had put several loose screws and various worthless watch parts inside the case, so that when Bill threw it against the floor, parts would be scattered all over the floor.
For 60 years, Dan Price had believed the incident was real.
Bill Ryan’s son, Tom Ryan, remembers that Bill and Neal loved to visit West Kentucky graveyards in their golden years and reminisce. Neal had just a few strands of hair left (Bill didn't have any strands), so one day Bill yanked the half dozen or so hairs out of Neal's head. He probably got tired of having to watch Neal comb those few strands.
Tom had two more stories from the Barlow days to share.
Dan Price would often stop and buy a sack of cookies to share when he loafed at the station. One day in front of several loafers, Neal pulled the cookies in half and licked the marshmallow off the inside of every cookie. Feigning anger, Bill threw the sack out on the drive and smashed them with his foot in front of the stunned Dan.
Then there was the time that a man came to the Barlow station, accompanied by his dog. The station was crowded with the usual cast of loafers and hangers-on.
The man had a pack of crackers, threw one onto the floor, and told the people the dog wouldn’t touch those crackers unless someone threw some change down. For a while, the dog sat there ignoring the cracker. Then one of the regulars threw a coin on the floor and the dog ate the cracker.
The man threw another cracker. Instead of a coin, one of the men threw a washer on the floor. The dog picked up the cracker, looked at the washer, and spat out the cracker.
I don’t know if the dog was smart enough to make change, but it might have been.