Media & news

Last September I wrote an article titled “The Dog Days of Summer” about our summers growing up in the 1960’s in north Mississippi. We made up games, ran the neighborhood, dug holes to China, rode bikes, and went to the “Y” and played baseball. We were free — until Labor Day. We never started back to school until the Tuesday after Labor Day. My grandkids now start back the first week in August. Our summers seemed endless — theirs seem too short.

One of the annual events of summer was the visit from our next-door neighbor’s grandson. Our next-door neighbor was Ms. Pearl Hanson. She was a large, hateful “widow woman.” Nothing was ever quite right. She and her house smelled like “old people.” She ran kids out of her yard. She fussed about everything.  

She was originally from Illinois and to hear her tell it, as she too often did, there was no better place in the world than Illinois. She had moved to Corinth with her husband, Hamer, who was the regional executive for one of the railroads. The rumor was that Hamer finally just gave it up and died so he wouldn’t have to put up with her demands and rules. But she liked my mom, and mom would look after her and help her with things.

Ms. Hanson’s only child, Jack, was the most senior pilot at United Airlines and lived in Palos Verdes, California, the second-best place on earth to live, other than Illinois. Jack had three sons and they would visit when they had to.

The youngest son was Rowland, who was a year ahead of me in school. Rowland was what we called a “hellion.” He was always in trouble and was always looking for trouble. He wasn’t a mean-spirited kid. He didn’t bully the younger kids. He was just always pushing whatever envelope he was in. As he reached his teen years, apparently, he became too much for his mom with his dad flying all the time. So, for a few years, he was dispatched from Los Angeles to serve a sentence in rural north Mississippi with us country kids and his hateful grandmother.

One year when he was about fourteen, he brought a large box of cherry bombs with him. A large box meant he had dozens and dozens — maybe hundreds — of cherry bombs, and we had our few measly packages of nickel Black Cat firecrackers. To say we were out-gunned was an understatement, but Rowland was generous with his cherry bombs and let us shoot a lot of them, too.

We were all good with our pyrotechnic arrangements until he laid under the big bush in Ms. Hanson’s yard and tried to throw cherry bombs under cars as they drove down Maple Road. He even threw one under the police car when it came to investigate. We all got in trouble for that.

Ms. Hanson was very protective of her three apple trees in her back yard and would run us out if she thought we were picking her apples. (She would bring us apple butter she made from them). Rowland loved to talk us into picking apples and having apple wars in her back yard. She, of course, would call my mom, and we would all be in trouble again.

 Rowland’s favorite pastime was to run behind the “fogging machine,” a city maintenance truck that would go through the neighborhoods a couple times a week in the summer spraying pesticides to kill mosquitos. Rowland had never seen a fogging machine in California and would insist we chase the truck running in the dense cloud of poisons for blocks and blocks until we all had headaches. That probably explains more than I want to admit.         

When in high school, he would bring his yearbook to show us that he was a star linebacker for the Palos Verdes High Sea Kings and played with George Allen, Jr., whose dad was the coach of the Los Angeles Rams. He would get to go to the Rams’ practices. All really big stuff to us.

When summer was over, he went back to Palos Verdes and left us to our mundane rural futures. Ms. Hanson could take a deep breath. We all thought Rowland would end up in jail.

My mom and Rowland’s dad were friends, and she kept up with Rowland’s life. He graduated from Loyola Marymount and got married. He received an MBA from Wharton School of Business at Pennsylvania University and had kids. He worked as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Neutrogena, and then went to work for a small startup company in Seattle. Mom didn’t approve of that move, but the small startup was Microsoft. He was a central figure in Microsoft’s growth and is credited with naming “Windows” and convincing Bill Gates to use the name instead of “Interface Manager.”

I understand he now lives in Santa Barbara, California, in an original Spanish Mission that he and his wife restored. He is still active and doing marketing work through his company CRH and Associates. He is on the internet — he has a Wikipedia page.

The last time I spoke with Rowland was when George Allen, Jr. was doing a program for us and re-connected us. Rowland was shocked to learn that I was the CEO of an electric utility and not in jail. I told him I felt the same way about him. It was good to catch up after so many years. You never know how people will turn out, if you give them a chance. They just might outgrow their hateful grandmothers.