The Saturday Picture Show, September 26, 2026

 

This is the gravesite of Frances Bavier, the actress who played Aunt Bee for so many great years on the Andy Griffith Show. Bee was great at everything around the house, so the one episode known as The Pickle Story (Season 2, episode 11) shows her one weakness in the kitchen: every time she tries to make homemade pickles, she gets what Barney calls "kerosene cucumbers." Fans have taken to leaving jars of pickles, homemade and otherwise, at the gravesite. I think Bee would be pleased if someone rounded up the jars now and then for the hungry among us.

Wasn't it great the other night, after the final Orioles home game, that First Baseman and Most Valuable Oriole Pete Alonso led them back on the field to doff their caps and thank the fans? No, it was not a great season, but just wait 'til next year!

Oh give me a home on the open range!

I might have to rethink my options for Halloween this year. I had my heart set on being a minion, but maybe ET suits me better...

Dig this getup for the Renaissance Fair! Maryland-themed all the way, and we DO have the coolest state flag of all!

1950 on Broadway in New York City. Right out of "Guys and Dolls" with the orange juice and 15-cent slices of pizza. 

For those of us on the city water system: the drought is forcing the city to start siphoning in some Susgquehanna River water into our spigots. So that's why, if your coffee starts tasting like Havre de Grace soon...

Baltimore City made a poor decision to sell old "battle tested" police car parts to souvenir collectors. Not wise. Someone will attach this door to their Explorer and go around playing Adam-12 one day....

Someone far smarter than I (and there are millions) will come up with the idea to sell a tin that's half Danish cookies and half sewing notions - buttons, threads, and what not. The best of both uses!

A chicken fulfilling his destiny of getting to the other side! Which is where Popeye is waiting to serve him.

Free advice costs nothing and it's worth the price

 I see that it's the fall of the year, and people have put away their bathing apparel and summer wardrobes. That's usually a sign that people are (gasp!) going to work, often for the first time ever!

So, as a man who went to work on many first days, may I share something I saw online? Someone's wise father typed up this list of hints, and I urge the newly-employed and future employees alike to check it out:

 Yes! For those bosses who think being on time is being late, be early! Make a lot of new friends, and this starts with a pleasant greeting first thing. Yes, the receptionist knows everything, and trust me, you will learn how true this question is: "Do you want to speak to the Man In Charge, or the Woman Who Knows What's Going On?"

I was often the older guy but never the quiet older guy, but either way, go on. No, it's not a family. It's a workplace, and you have to be aware of whom to trust, and that may or may not be the person you are told to trust. Hold your gossip until you know for sure who is friends/married to/related to/sleeping with whom.

Yes, have a pen and a something to write on. A little stack of index cards will come in handy often! But don't be the goofus whose boss asks them to jot down something important, only to have to say, do you have a pen?

And by all means, respect yourself and your own time, too! This unpaid overtime "It's all for the good of the company" nonsense is nonsense. You deserve your lunch break and you deserve to go home when the day is done, and don't let them guilt trip you into hanging around til 7 to clear up that O'Hoolahan matter.

Rest in peace?

How many times have you seen this? A beloved celebrity dies, and the family problems come pouring out of the woodwork.

Late last year, right around Christmas time, the father of Tejano music star, the dearly beloved and sadly departed Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, died. His name was Abraham Quintanilla, Jr. He had been running the family business and Selena's estate since she was murdered in 1995. And then the curtain came up on the family drama. 

Selena's brother, A.B. Quintanilla, and her sister, Suzette Quintanilla, are going after each other in a legal battle over the family business (Q Productions) and Selena's personal estate.  

A.B. sued Suzette and the production company earlier this month, seeking a million dollars in damages and a complete financial accounting of the family money.

Suzette and her mother, Marcella, deny any mishandling of the money.

Remember, this family hung together and helped Selena become the queen that she was until she was murdered by a woman she trusted. Now, 31 years later, with the father gone, they're fighting over the money.

Sometimes it doesn't take decades for the fighting to begin. Dolly Parton has just been laid to rest, and her relatives are fighting already. 

Dolly's estate has filed suit against her nephew Bryan Seaver, the son of her sister Cassie. He was Dolly's head of security for more than 20 years, and he got bounced earlier this month. So now comes the family suit, claiming he threatened to ruin the wonderful name and legacy Dolly left behind. It also claims he made repeated violent threats toward her employees.

All of this brings up the age-old question of why people can't just let each live in peace. Dolly and Selena deserve better!

Deez nutcrackers

I am proud of another member of my family, one who can fly around and bury seeds and remember where they are buried!

There is this bird, see, a whole lot of them, sharing the name Clark's Nutcracker, and every fall, they round up as many as 98,000 pine seeds and bury them in about 5,000 little caches, 2 to 4 seeds per location.

Technically, they are passerine birds in the family Corvidae, native to the mountains of western North America. So they don't live around here, but they do send pretty pictures....

And then, they remember where they buried almost all of those seeds! They have a map in their tiny bird brains about where they left those snacks behind, meaning that no matter how cold and long the winter is, they remember their cache of seeds. Science knows that they use triangulation...measuring angles and distances between landscape features (rocks, big trees, fallen logs) to pinpoint the hiding places.

And get this! They intentionally over-cache, so there are seeds planted they will not need and will not return for, and a certain amount of those seeds will germinate and become new pine forests.

I mean, what could be better for nature than this? I am proud to be kin to these nutcrackers!

 

Look away!

 After Alabama finished off Florida State, 50-36 on Saturday, the eyes of the college football world turned to Oxford, Mississippi, in hopes that Ole Miss could send Louisiana State home empty-handed.

The score of that game did not mean that much to me, but I often look back on the days when Mississippi finally had to face up to their past and allow African American students to enroll in their university (which is and was for the people who live there, not a private institution.) The struggle for basic human decency and opportunity for all came to Ole Miss in the fall of 1962, when Air Force veteran James Meredith (eventually) enrolled as the school's first Black student. With support from the NAACP, Meredith had sought to transfer to the U of MS, and a federal court order was granted to make that happen.

(The sports teams at that fine institution of higher learning were, and are, called the Rebels. That should tell you something about how popular the Civil War was there.)

Mississippi's Governor Ross Barnett openly defied the federal court order trying to keep Meredith registering. In fact, riots brought out on the campus on September 30, 1962, with segregationists fighting the federal marshalls sent by President John F. Kennedy. Two rioters died; hundreds more were injured. Faced with armed rebellion, Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and sent thousands of U.S. Army troops and federal marshals the campus. That worked, and Meredith enrolled for classes on October 1. He needed, and was given, round-the-clock federal protection just to be able to go to class and get an education. 

The amazing thing to me continues to be that such a basic right offered to all citizens had to be fought for at all, let alone with soldiers and deaths. I was in sixth grade and already an keen watcher of the nightly news with Douglas Edwards, who was to tell us just two weeks later about the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding. Just to think, in that one month, we faced destruction from within and from without, and the strong hand of John F. Kennedy guided us to safe conclusions.

That's the sort of thing that should be considered honorable.

By the way - the backup quarterback on the undefeated Rebels football team that autumn was a guy who found his living in music, instead of football. Jim Weatherly wrote "Neither One Of Us," "Midnight Train To Georgia," and "Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me," and also composed music for movies and television show. 

Jim Weatherly passed away in 2021. Long before that, African American students and athletes became vital parts of the University of Mississippi. It's just a shame that it took courts and deaths and so much time for it to happen. 

Tonight's the night!

 Do you remember the 21st night of September? As the song goes, "Love was changin' the minds of pretenders, While chasin' the clouds away..."

Tonight is the 21st night of September, and this song by pop-funk group Earth, Wind, and Fire urges you to remember the happy times in your days gone by, and not to dig too deeply into what the song is about. 

The chant of "Ba-de-ya" was written as a hook that anyone in the world could sing, no matter their usual language.

The song was released in November in 1978, so the month was not significant.

Matter of fact, the day - the 21st - didn't matter either. The songwriters say they tried any number of dates in the first line, and "the 21st" fit in best.

That's all. Listen, I come from the days when people took the lyrics to a song and spread them out on their desk like a buffet of words and then tried to say, "When they wrote about watching the roll on by, they were talking about tears rolling down the cheeks of someone who just had their heartbroken."

No. Sometimes the words are just the words. Listen to the song and try not to dance around the floor.

Sunday Rerun: Generous

 People from other countries often have difficulty comprehending the concept (there's that word again!) of volunteer fire companies. I guess it's a purely American idea, people doing something at considerable personal risk, inconvenience, and expense that one could say is the responsibility of the government to handle.

But since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who organized the first "fire brigade" in Philadelphian, people here have dropped - literally! - what they're doing and run to the fire house to go help someone or some someones in need.

Things like this don't happen for free, and that was the problem for a volunteer company in Calhoun, Missouri, where chief Mark Hardin gloomily scanned the balance sheet for his company and saw a bottom line of $169. 

169 bucks won't go far when you need new turnout gear and mobile equipment. They had not been able to afford either since the 1980s.

“It was pretty discouraging — we’d already been paying for stuff out of our own pockets to keep things going,” said Hardin. He retired as a firefighter in Arkansas and moved to Calhoun, winding up as chief of the company, serving a town of maybe 500. “I probably shouldn’t tell how much of our own money we’ve spent. My wife would divorce me," he said. 

On an annual stipend of $4800, his 28 volunteers were trying to keep two engines on the road and scrape by for fuel and other supplies. They are lucky in that they receive donations of hand-me-down gear and other necessities from other departments. Volunteer companies are like that. They'll as likely give a recently-replaced engine to a smaller company down the road as trade it in. It's all part of the giving-back ethos.

As Hardin was noodling his way out of the financial morass, along came a phone call from 91-year-old Sam Sloan, who lives two miles up the road from the fire house.

Hardin said: "I’d never met Sam, but he invited me to breakfast. He wanted to ask me a bunch of general questions about the fire department.”

They went to breakfast again the next week, and the third week, Sloan invited Chief Hardin to come up to his house, where he presented the company with a check for $500,000.

“I walked in the door and Sam said, ‘What do you think about this?’” Hardin said.

And what he thought about that was, that he had never seen that many zeroes in a check.

Sloan told the chief that his cattle and seed businesses had been good for him, and he decided that when he sold his businesses and land that he was determined to make a contribution to the volunteers.

He and his wife Jan have a nice house and 60 acres to pass on to their one son someday, and for now the couple want to share their bounty with deserving people. He just says he has always admired volunteer firefighters.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I knew at this point in my life, I could help. It’s important to have a good fire department, especially with all the grass we have around here.”

Hardin thanked Sloan 20 times for the kind donation, then drove straight to the bank to increase the company's balance to $500,169.

Chief Hardin plans to get a new fire engine and some other equipment, plus new protective gear for all the members. 

And they bought a helmet for their new honorary chief Sloan to wear around.