Remembering John Earl

Another friend of my youth has come to the end of his life here among us. To gage his importance in my scheme of things, consider that he is listed for five different pages in the index to my book (A Boy in the Amen Corner). Allow me to review why this is so.

I called the first column about John Earl Henson "Into the Den of Iniquity" to catch readers' eyes. John Earl and I were in Tryon with nothing to do, a rare circumstance, because I usually had a job in town and his father always had something for him to do. He led me into a dark alley under the stairs between buildings into the pool hall. There he showed me how to play Rotation, I think it was, and we had a great time until our money ran out. Applied geometry and physics-the stuff we were learning in school was actually useful in the real world!

Another day John Earl suggested that we get our lunch at the Rock Grill, nestled into the bank under the railroad tracks near where the clock tower is now. We enjoyed a great hamburger washed down with a big RC from a bottle that had been up to its neck in icy water just moments before. Another good and satisfying experience.

My mother was gravely disappointed by my going into those places, and strongly advised me not to do so again. Her problem was that beer was available at both locations. Mother stopped short of asking me not to associate with John Earl any more; she probably realized that would be like asking squirrels not to climb trees.

I am privileged to write for the Bulletin, but I am happy to say that John Earl was the better writer.

I try to get some humor into all my columns, but he was a natural-born humorist whose turns of phrase were often surprising and usually funny as well. We had to write a theme every week for High School English class. We discovered that the typing classroom was vacant during the period before English, so he and I went in there and typed up our themes. The keys of the typewriters had solid black metal caps on them, but we "hunt-and-pecked" nearly perfect papers right out of our heads, and turned them in hot off the typewriter on the day they were due!

The school cafeteria was run by Mrs. Taylor, so the food was plentiful and better than most people's home cooking. John Earl and I had the ravenous appetites of growing boys, and he would turn on the charm to get Mrs. Taylor to give us another ear of corn or hotdog.

He and I both wore glasses, so the teachers often got us mixed up. John Earl was more muscular than I, from loading sand into his dad's dump truck with a shovel down by the river bank. I will never forget the day the coach paired us for a boxing match in phys ed. They put the gloves on us and took away our glasses. I don't know what he could see, but as soon as I put up my gloves, I just saw a blur while taking two or three jarring blows. Fortunately for me, coach stopped the foolishness before any real damage was done.

When I retired here after some forty years away from Our Area, I looked up John Earl. He gave me a little tour of his enterprises based across the road from his brother Mack's road building works. He also showed me several houses that line the road as belonging to wife number one, wife number two, and so on. Always the humorist! He then invited my brother and me to dine at his house in the South Carolina wilderness identified at the entrance road as "Disisit." Its amenities include an outbuilding labeled the "Pout House."

It has been said that "a friend is someone who likes you even though he knows you." I always enjoyed time spent with John Earl. What more could one ask of a friend?