‘Drop Kick Me Jesus’ is a classic song of life

Professional football is like a religion in many American households, and the upcoming Super Bowl (Sunday, Feb. 2) in Miami, Fla., is a regarded as a prayerful occasion for fans of the contending teams.

Places of worship might want to go with the flow. A suggested Feb. 2 sermon topic might be Bobby Bare’s country music song from 1976: “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life.”

Lots of preachers, over the last 40+ years, have made the connection for their congregations. Before one can truly grasp and embrace the religious connotations, it’s important to understand the significance of a drop kick…and the man who perfected it.

The drop kick is defined as “a kick by a player who drops the ball and kicks it as, or immediately after, it touches the ground.” One method of scoring a field goal or extra point is by drop-kicking the football through the goalposts.

A drop kick can also be a defensive play, employed as a surprise maneuver. The drop kick originated in the sport of rugby.

The best collegiate drop kick kicker of all time was Forrest Ingram “Frosty” Peters, who played for the Montana State College Bobcats in 1924. He converted 17 drop kicks into field goals in a game between the Bobcats’ freshman team and Billings Polytechnic Institute, leading his team to a 64-0 victory.

During that era, the shape of the football was rounder on the ends, and the two professional players who were the most skillful drop kick kickers were John “Paddy” Driscoll of the Chicago Cardinals and Elbert “Al” Lorraine Bloodgood of the Kansas City Cowboys.

In 1934, the ball was made more pointed at the ends. This made passing the ball easier, but made the drop kick practically obsolete. The more pointed ball did not bounce up from the ground reliably. For field goals and extra points, the drop kick was supplanted by the place kick.

Technically, today’s football is a “prolate spheroid,” and a Madden NFL video game software engineer said that when the ball bounces, it can go dagnabbitly in “30 different ways.” Physicist Toan Pham, the group’s technical director, laughingly states that on the field it seems “more like 30 thousand; or 30 billion.”

One football player who seemed to have the corner on “lucky bounces” was Doug Flutie, who launched the memorable “Hail Mary” pass in 1984 to give his Boston College team an upset win over the University of Miami (Fla.).

According to the National Football League Hall of Fame, the last extra point made by a drop kick in the NFL was booted through the uprights by the same Doug Flutie, who at age 43 was playing his final pro game as a member of the New England Patriots on Jan. 1, 2006.

Flutie’s kick was the NFL’s first extra point via a drop kick since Ray “Scooter” McLean of the Chicago Bears knocked one through back in 1941.

Bobby Bare’s legendary drop kick song, with a two-step beat, which was written by Paul Craft, goes like this:

Drop kick me Jesus through the goalposts of life

End over end, neither left nor the right,

Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights.

I’ve got the will Lord, if you’ve got the toe.

Dr. William S. Barnes of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando, Fla., said the verse he likes best is:

Make me, oh make me, Lord more than I am.

Make me a piece in your master game plan,

Free from the Earthly temptations below;

I’ve got the will, Lord if you’ve got the toe.

“That’s what I want God to do with me: to make me more than I am, to ‘make me a piece in His master game plan’ for life,” Dr. Barnes said.

“I get all caught up in Earthly things, especially the temptation to trust more in money and things that I can hold and see than in God,” Dr. Barnes said. “I have the will to want these things, but as the song says, I need God’s toe. And that means a good, hard kick in the ‘buts.’”

“Buts” are feeble, human excuses that attempt to “block that kick.”

St. Nick visits Harkers Island in the ‘loon light’

Many people wrote poetry for The Mailboat from 1990-12, including Jerry Barton of Harkers Island. He was best known as an electronics manufacturer who specialized in fish scopes, sextants and other “electronic gadgetry.”

But Jerry Barton also had a way with words. Here’s his “only slightly altered” version of this famous Christmas poem that is preserved in the archives at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center in Harkers Island.

(Dagnabbit. Christmas Eve 2019 came and went before I could get it posted.…but ‘tis better late than never…and perhaps this prolongs the glow of Christmas for you and your family….)

Twas the night a’fore Christmas and bright shone the moon,

The only thing stirring was a pot of stewed loon.

The windows were open to air out the place,

As for lurking Game Wardens, there was nary a trace.

The roar of an outboard fell on my ear,

To get caught with a loon quite filled me with fear.

I looked out the window, what frightened me more

Were two running lights headin’ right for my shore.

“Youngerns,” said I, “we’re in a heck of a scrape,”

The best thing for me is to plan my escape.

Who comes to my doorstep from out of the sea?

With my pot full of loon, I am all set to flee.

The engine choked off; there was a yell and a thump,

It was jolly old Santa a’ground on a lump.

He pulled on his waders and stepped off his boat,

Next thing he knew, the water’s up to his throat.

He muttered and grumbled, and I swear that he swore,

As he staggered and stumbled out onto the shore.

His sack full of goodies and gifts for our fun

Was loaded with water and weighed near a ton.

He came toward my cottage to leave off the presents

And trod on a nest with two sleeping pheasants.

They flew from their nest with a thunder of wings,

He fell on his rump and broke half of his things.

He got to his feet and dragging his sack,

He limped to the landing, not looking back.

He sputtered and fussed on the way to his skiff,

He hardly could board it ’cause he was so stiff.

He cranked on his engine till blue in the face.

When it got started, off he did race.

The last thing a heard as he hove out of sight,

“Hain’t I bin punished and mommicked this night!”

I wish he had stayed and not left so soon,

For I’d a fix him some dodgers and a mess-a stewed loon.

Taylors’ Christmas child evokes a ‘tear of joy’

Carteret County’s most celebrated storyteller is Rodney Kemp, and one of his favorite Christmas yarns, contained in “The Mailboat” publication of “Christmas Memories” from 1990-92, embraces the rural heritage and culture of the county.

Thanks to the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island for preserving those manuscripts that are a treasure chest of family holiday traditions.

This Rodney Kemp yarn begins on the Harlowe farm of Harry Lee Taylor, located in the “northern reaches of Carteret County.”

As Kemp tells it: “Mr. Harry Lee Taylor’s shoulders hunched forward to protect against the bone chill of an early 1900s December morning. He whistled for his horses, Old Baldy and Charlie, to commence the annual trip from Harlowe south to Beaufort.”

The buckboard would carry him about 14 miles into Beaufort to “do his buying and trading for his family’s Christmas gifts.”

“Mr. Harry always said ‘buggy time was thinking time’ and his thoughts this morning were on his wife, whom he always referred to as Miss Aleta, and his nine children.”

Taylor pulled to a stop in front of the Carteret County Poor Home and Orphanage, located some three miles outside of Beaufort. He noticed a young boy standing away from the others. He was sobbing.

Kemp said that Taylor approached the caretaker and inquired about the boy. The caretaker said the boy arrived about a month ago; both parents had died suddenly. “He’s 12, small for his age. He don’t eat much. He just stares down the road and cries. Name’s Norton.”

Taylor adopted Norton on the spot, telling the boy: “I need somebody to help me drive that team of horses. You interested?”

In Beaufort, the first stop was at the Davis House on Front Street, where Miss Sally Ann Davis had hot baths in the back for a nickel. “Norton needed about a quarter’s worth,” Kemp said.

After a day of shopping in Beaufort, Norton guided Old Baldy and Charlie back to Harlowe. It was late when they arrived but one of the Taylor boys was still awake. He peeked out his window and announced: “Daddy’s letting someone drive his horses. You’ve got to be mighty special to get to drive Old Baldy and Charlie.”

“Mr. Harry lifted Norton down off his seat and placed him on the porch in front of his wife…and said: ‘Miss Aleta, for your Christmas present I’ve made you the mother of a fine son.’”

“She smiled that approving smile of love and said, ‘I thank you for a painless delivery.’”

“Then, she opened her arms and took Norton into her heart as great tears of Christmas joy burst from both of them,” Kemp wrote.

“Of all of Harry Lee Taylor’s five sons, the old-timers used to say: ‘Dagnabbit all, that Norton was the one who was most like him.’”

Also writing for “The Mailboat,” Eddie Hill affirmed that “Christmas on the coast…is a time of family gathering, heart-felt fellowship and plenty of goodwill and holiday cheer.”

However, one year…Down East was “besieged by a horrendous snow storm, making even the most limited travel virtually impossible. The short distance between Gloucester and Atlantic (about 22 miles) suddenly became impassable.”

Eddie Hill and his wife, Nita, remained confident that the snowstorm would soon end, but they were wrong. Hill wrote: “Hours merged into days…with no signs of sunshine or a break in the weather.”

“Drawing upon our innermost strength and determined to turn this tribulation into a triumph, we found a silver lining in the midst of the snow clouds. The quiet time that we shared will long be remembered…and the deer ham by candlelight will always hold a special place in our Christmas memories.”

“Maybe every Christmas needs a bit of hardship to help us appreciate the wonder of it all….” He said: “It may sound ‘corny,’ but we really do care about seeing each other more than any present in the world. That’s how it is when you come from a large family, one that is filled with love for one another.”

Indeed, “love is a priceless gift, one that each of us treasures,” Hill wrote. “That is what Christmas is all about – loving one another and sharing the joy of the season.”

‘Crab pot trees are ‘indigenous’ to Down East

Happy 10-year anniversary to the illumination of the “official crab pot Christmas tree,” invented in Down East Carteret County, North Carolina, U.S.A.

It’s a case study in American entrepreneurship…and one of the highest order.

There is just something good and wholesome about seeing local folks cashing in and capitalizing on an authentic culture and heritage that they have embraced for generations. This success story was essentially scripted by proud families who have lived by the seashore and worked as watermen.

Yep, yep, yep. The Santa Claus figure in this yarn is none other than Neal “Nicky” Harvey. He created the first crab pot Christmas tree one day when he was just tinkering in his shop.

Harvey was raised to be a commercial fisherman, and that’s what he did until he reeled it in 1981 for the last time. He started a family business – Harvey & Sons Net and Twine – in the community of Davis. He made the nets that shrimpers used on their trawler vessels.

“When shrimping slumped, he switched to manufacturing traps for the thriving crab business,” wrote Cameron Walker, a contributor to Business North Carolina magazine.

Trapping male blue crabs requires sturdy, but simple wire cubes. The contraptions are known as crab pots.

Writing for Our State magazine, Bill Morris said: “The first metal crab pots were made from plain galvanized chicken wire, but were…quick to rust.” Vinyl-coated wire became the standard, available in assorted colors.

“Green wire has long been the standard color, which could account for the flash of genius that inspired the crab pot Christmas tree,” Morris noted. “Of all the thousands of people who have worked with green-coated crab pot wire, it was Harvey who saw that it could be cut into triangles and made into a tree.”

“We just got the idea to cut some pieces of scrap that we had left over in the shop,” Harvey commented, “and we started putting lights on them. When we got all our crab pot orders filled, we start making trees.”

“The important thing,” he said, “is that we came up with a way to make it fold flat” with the lights still attached, for easy storage.

Some people, however, prefer to display their trees only partially unfolded. They open them halfway to 180 degrees and put them against a wall as “half trees.”

Crab pot trees have other geometric properties. Open only 90 degrees, a tree fits neatly into the corner of an interior room. Outdoors, the trees can be wrapped around the corner of a building (270 degrees) for yet another special effect.

As the crab pot business began to taper off in the early 2000s, Harvey said he realized that in order to survive, he needed to work harder “at getting this tree business going.”

It was just a cottage industry until 2009, when Harvey sold the upstart business to Don Acree. He formed a company known as Fisherman Creations Inc., based in Smyrna, to brand, produce and market crab pot Christmas trees to gobs of customers, both locally and from “Off.”

(Technically, “Off” is the rest of world that is connected both physically and emotionally to Carteret County.)

Acree built a national distribution system through major outlets and established a huge e-commerce presence.

Acree said the company uses American-made “hexagonal wire mesh,” that is both strong and pliable. Reviews from customers rate the trees as “lovely, beautiful, practical and ideal for indoor or outdoor use.”

Part of the reason for the popularity of crab pot trees is their simplicity, Acree says. “There are no dropped needles, no watering, no stringing of lights or struggling with a stand.”

Business spikes every time a down-homey article and pretty pictures of the crab pot trees appear in Our State magazine.

Acree and his team of 15 associates are praising their lucky stars this year. Dagnabbit, they hit the dad-gum jackpot.

A trio of crab pot Christmas trees adorn the cover of Our State’s special 2019 Christmas edition.

They are pretty-pictured at sunset on the end of a dock in Marshallberg, overlooking Sleepy Creek.

Compliments to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson and her staff at Our State. The Down East photo is a great choice to illustrate “A North Carolina Christmas.”

Holiday memories gather ‘round the Christmas tree’

Decorating the Christmas tree was a family tradition that created competing emotions. It was exciting to plan the holiday music playlist, stacking the long-playing records on the hi-fi. The carols would embellish the joyful, fa-la-la experience.

Anticipation would border on anxiety, however. Would the chosen tree be too tall and brush the ceiling, leaving no space for the Christmas angel to ascend to the tip-top? Would the base of the trunk be too fat to fit within the red ring of the tree stand?

What is the rule? Measure twice and cut once? My father was a trial-and-error kind of guy. My mother was an “I told you so” type of supervisor.

Inside the big box marked “Christmas lights” lurked one of the great mysteries of the yuletide. How did those strings of multi-colored, jumbo-sized tree lights always manage to devilishly tangle themselves up while lying dormant in the basement during the 11-month off-season?

Cousin Marc had a term for it – the “knot before Christmas.”

After the lights were looped around the tree and stuffed inside to fill any gaps, it was easy-peasy in those days to just switch the bulbs around if one refused to light or it there were too many of one color clustered together.

Hanging the ornaments was the best part of the process. Each ball or trinket had a memory of a Christmas past. Cardinals in a nest were special. They always had a reserved place on an outer bough at child’s-eye level.

The finishing touch, however, was always the application of the silver icicles, also known in some regions as tinsel. Ugh.

Christmas tree icicles were invented in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1610. Originally made from extruded silver that was pounded flat and cut into thin strips, the product was called “lametta.” Since silver tarnishes, tinsel was later made of tin (of course!). Today, lametta is made of shiny plastic materials.

Lametta was a good name for those pesky, staticky strands that caused generations of children to wail, whine, moan and express other sounds of lamentation when asked to help carefully place icicles on the branches. (No tossing was allowed. Just as well throw me in the briar patch.)

Rosemary Washington, a watercolorist and writer based in Seattle, Wash., recalls how her mother instructed her and eight siblings how to carefully lay icicles “strand by single strand, over the needled branches.”

Washington wrote: “I soon grew weary of the tedious task of decking our tree with tinsel. It was so tempting to apply it in clumps, because strand-by-strand was soooo slow!”

(A word to Ms. Washington: “Put yourself in the shoes of an only child.”)

“Mother was so frugal that she saved tinsel from year to year,” Washington said. “That meant that once the holidays were over, we’d have to carefully remove the tinsel, and drape it over our hands so the strands wouldn’t get tangled…another laborious job.”

Clare Ansberry of The Wall Street Journal once wrote: “Tinsel is like fruitcake. People either love those thin, silvery strands of plastic or they hate it.”

Susan Vollenweider of Smithville, Mo., is a foe. “I’m an anti-tinselist,” she said. Icicles are full of static, sticking “to everything but the tree.”

It’s true. For weeks after the tree has been cleared away, the dagnabbit lametta will still turn up around the house, like a Christmas memory for your vacuum cleaner.

“I burn through enough vacuum cleaners without tinsel,” Vollenweider remarked.

Perhaps we should show lametta and tinsel and icicles some mercy…and reflect on the timeless Ukrainian story about the spider and the Christmas tree.

Years and years ago, a poor widow and all her children, living in a tumble-down shack, went to bed on Christmas Eve with heavy hearts. They had grown a tree that they brought inside, but there was no money for ornaments to decorate the tree.

Spiders inhabiting the attic of the humble abode heard the sobs of the children and their sad cries. The spiders decided they would not leave the Christmas tree bare.

They crept downstairs under the cloak of darkness and crawled all over the tree spinning intricate webs. When the Christkind came, he saw what had happened…and transformed the spider webs into silver strands that shimmered in candlelight.

A sad sapling put a dent in aluminum tree business

Glittering, shimmering and basking in the glow of gently rotating color wheels, aluminum Christmas trees were advertised to last forever. That was the claim professed by the Aluminum Specialty Company of Manitowoc, Wis.

Its “Evergleam” aluminum trees, introduced in 1959, were deemed “disco cool” way before disco was cool.

Aluminum was reflective of the post-World War II “Space Age,” and advertisers targeted America’s growing middle-class market, presenting “new ideals of home and family, with a fresh, rocket ship sheen to it,” wrote David Murray of the Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune.

National magazines featured advertising that touted the “lightness, brightness and beauty of aluminum that will come into your home and into your life,” Murray said.

“We had a very good indication that this aluminum tree thing was going to go big,” said Jerry Waak, who was Aluminum Specialty’s sales manager. He told Mary Louise Schumacher, a journalist based in Milwaukee, Wis., that the company ran around-the-clock to meet production demands.

Peering into the 1960s, the future looked exceptionally bright for the aluminum tree industry, Waak said.

“Coincidentally, or not, a television special, ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas,’ premiered in 1965, about the same time the aluminum tree craze began to thin out in American households,” Schumacher said.

“She was a bossy little thing, that Lucy Van Pelt, with her dictate to Charlie Brown: ‘Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find.’ The familiar story ends, of course, with the earnest Charlie defying Lucy and finding the ‘true meaning of Christmas’ in a wee little fir, rather than the artificial space-age icon.”

Indeed. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” resonated with television audiences in a way no other children’s programming had before, just the way the Peanuts comic strip cartoonist Charles Schulz had hoped it would.

Schulz was never shy, but always sly, in promoting social causes he believed in through his commercial work.

Reporter Murray opined: “Charlie Brown’s scrawny Christmas tree represented something missing from American culture: authenticity.” The show “was used to represent all that was wrong with Christmas…the aluminum Christmas tree.” Egads.

Right or wrong, dagnabbit, the airing of the Charlie Brown show contributed to the demise of the aluminum tree industry.

Production of Evergleam trees ceased in 1971, and Aluminum Specialty reverted to its core product line – cookware collections.

“Years later, though, it seems Lucy’s instincts for something modern turned out to possess enough holiday oomph, after all,” Schumacher said.

Two Manitowoc artists of national acclaim – Julie Lindemann and John Shimon – published a book in 2004, Season’s Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree. “More than 45 stunning color photographs reveal the beauty and range of aluminum arbor,” Schumacher said.

Lindemann and Shimon may not have “invented” the retro movement to reclaim aluminum Christmas trees, but they definitely helped propel it to the forefront.

“Today the trade in vintage aluminum trees is fierce, and these crisp, beautiful symbols of modern living are again brightening thousands of American holidays,” Schumacher wrote. “Season’s Gleamings is a reminder of how beautiful an aluminum tree can be…for lovers of Christmas.”

“Beguiled by the wonderfully odd, antenna-like forms, Lindemann and Shimon thought of the aluminum trees as more than forgotten seasonal décor,” Schumacher wrote. “To them, they were sculpture.”

The artists created “a forest of the spiky, metallic trees in a 19th century warehouse that became their art gallery, home and studio.”

“They rescued trees, one by one, and placed a ‘we-want-your-trees’ ad on a local radio station. At the time, many in Manitowoc thought the trees hopelessly passé, even tacky or sterile, and unloaded them happily.”

“With a little effort, the couple grew a forest of 40 trees” that were brought to life again. “With spotlights illuminating the trees from beneath, pools of light danced across the walls.”

And the people came to witness, including “these little grannies with their Instamatics coming up to our windows just wanting to look at our trees,” Lindemann said.

“There is something harsh about them (the silver trees),” she said. “The ultimate consumer symbol, they are very American well.”

“There is something profound about them. It’s emblematic of how humans thought they could outdo nature at that time.”

‘Evergleam’ Christmas trees enjoy 60 years of holiday cheer

Silver trees and color wheels: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas from 1959. Happy 60th anniversary to the “Evergleam” brand of artificial Christmas trees. It was quite the rage.

The tradition lives on in Manitowoc, Wis., on the shores of Lake Michigan, once the home of the Aluminum Specialty Company, which manufactured the artificial, aluminum trees. During the Christmas season, the town is “busier than Santa’s Toyland.”

Patti Zarling of the Manitowoc Herald Times said: “Evergleam Christmas trees coming down the factory conveyor belt” once filled every spare warehouse that the Aluminum Specialty Company could find.

“We were selling up to a million trees a year for a while,” recalled Jerry Waak, former head of sales for the company. American Specialty sold more than 70% of the shiny trees in the 1960s. “It’s amazing how the whole thing took off,” he said.

Sarah Archer, an author based in Philadelphia, Pa., said that in the 1950s, “aluminum’s abundance was really a byproduct of the World War II effort.” Traditionalists who favored green trees called aluminum Christmas trees “tin Tannenbaums.”

Waak said the company selected the name “Evergleam” instead, capitalizing on technology to produce the trees at a reasonable cost at a time when people were looking for something new. It was a gamble that turned into a wild success.

Jack Levitan writes for the Eichler Network in San Francisco, which seeks to preserve the Californian “mid-century modern” style of architecture. Many of those home owners embraced Evergleams.

Bill Yaryan of San Fernando, Calif., thought about sitting on the floor and watching “the silver tree rotate on its stand while the color wheel revolved as well, in a kind of crazy dance. When the color wheel and tree were rotating, the effect was so wonderful and so totally artificial.”

“The tree and ornaments would change in unison” – a panorama blending from red to green to yellow to blue – “as the tree and wheel spun endlessly. It was completely unhinged from any other Christmas decorations in use then. Its space-age novelty was great.”

Gary Gand, a professional musician in Palm Springs, Calif., likens his personal Evergleam to an “aluminum pylon calling out into space and changing different colors. It’s like a seven-foot-tall lava lamp.” (That, my friends, is dagnabbitly cool.)

Levitan also interviewed Scot Nichols of San Jose, Calif., who noted the aluminum trees don’t shed their needles. “All the kitsch but no sticky pitch. There’s no mess involved. Christmas goes up – and Christmas goes down and into a box, and it’s gone. It’s pretty easy.”

Waak said the company would crinkle, split and curl each Evergleam needle, forming “what we called a pom-pom. That was the biggest hit. You got a reflection of every needle because of the crimping, so you had the maximum amount of light being reflected. There was a real brilliance to it.”

Downtown Manitowoc businesses “aluminize” their display windows with 60 or more vintage trees each holiday season to pay tribute to their hometown product with an amazing display called “Evergleams on Eighth,” a reference to the main north-south street that crosses the Manitowoc River. The trees will be exhibited from Nov. 18-Jan. 5.

Closer to home, in Brevard, N.C., the Transylvania (County) Heritage Museum is once again featuring the collection of aluminum trees that belongs to Stephen Jackson, owner of a custom home design and construction business in Brevard.

It all started as a joke in 1991, when a friend “gifted” Jackson a “tattered aluminum Christmas tree pilfered from a garbage heap.” Remembering the silver tree in his childhood home, Jackson threw a party and invited his guests to bring the “most aesthetically challenged” ornaments they could find.

That was the beginning of the Aluminum Tree & Ornament Museum (ATOM). Jackson was given a second tree in 1998, “unearthed at a yard sale.” Over the years, the project “snowballed as friends nabbed more trees from flea markets and dusty attics.”

The 2019 ATOM exhibit at the Transylvania Heritage Museum continues on days the main museum is open – Wednesday-Saturday (except on Thanksgiving), through Dec. 21. Admission is free but donations are appreciated.

A visit is recommended as a “whimsical and wacky adventure…a fun, quirky holiday outing that will make you smile and brighten your day,” according to RomanticAsheville.com, an independent travel guide. Brevard is located about 35 miles south of Asheville.