The Little Debbie Man

I just got back from a DeMolay father - son softball game and it reminded me of the Little Debbie man. As we were driving home I was telling my son about a time when my friends and I would play a pick-up game of baseball nearly every single day of the week for an entire summer.

At this particular time in my life I was about 9 or 10 years old. We lived in a huge trailer court somewhere in rural Louisiana. The trailer court was massive and was nestled in a heavily forested area along with some open fields and a few creeks. The summer I spent there is one of the happiest of my childhood. I remember the day we found an old parachute and used it to run and leap off a hill to catch a little bit of air. I remember spending two full days after 4th of July gathering every firecracker we could possibly find so we could remove the gunpowder and make one super giant firecracker. Rather than an explosion we got a massive flash which was still a satisfactory result.

I remember the times we spent harassing the monstrous nests of red fire ants. Acting as Gods we controlled their fate and ruled their lives on hot summer days. The fact that they could fight back with their painful bites helped make it exciting since there was always an element of real risk involved. We caught tadpoles in the creek and road our bicycles to every corner of the park.

My best memories are of playing baseball and pitching. As the summer drew to a close and our baseball games started to become more serious we were encouraged by our sponsor the "Little Debbie Man"; a young man who lived in a trailer in the area who would offer prizes of snacks to the winning teams. For our final match in the trailer park series the winning team received a largess of boxes upon boxes full of Little Debbie treats; Nutty Bars, all of our favorites. Enough so each player could gorge for days on end. (Sadly, the main reason for this massive amount of delicious treasure was due to the fact that the Little Debbie man was going to be moving away. This was his parting gift to our teams. Even the losers got quite a haul too!)

One special evening the Little Debbie man had a crisis. Insects in Louisiana are fierce and plentiful. When a wasps nest decides to move into your territory you are dealing with a fearsome force. The Little Debbie man had a plan to rid himself of the largest wasp nest we had ever seen, situated right near his front door. We decided to throw a fast pitch baseball right into it. Once the ball struck, the nest hit the ground, and seemingly hundreds of angry wasps came streaming after us as we all ran off screaming, and a few of us got hit. After this great fun we were showered with prizes of more Little Debbie snack cakes for our bravery in the line of duty.

My memory is notoriously bad, but I remember these few things because they represented such happy times in my young life, an occurrence that didn't happen nearly often enough. There were some bad things too. Like the time a dog bit my finger and sent me to the hospital with a number of stitches and people filled my young mind with fear as they talked about the possibility of rabies. I still have the scar today to remind me. There was the time I slipped on my sisters bike (that I was not supposed to be riding) and carved up my knee laying it open down the bare bone. To this day I still have a massive ragged scar from that traumatic event.

My most negative memories are from attending public school in Louisiana. Corporeal punishment was still the norm, with regular spankings with a paddle, rapped knuckles with a ruler and I heard a story of one young man who was given a choice between getting struck with a paddle 25 times by the principal or sticking his hand into a nest of fiery red ants as a punishment; he chose the fire ants and I vaguely recall it did not turn out well for him at all. Of course, I don't know if this was actually true or not, but it was the story I heard at the time. My teacher's favorite punishment for me, for committing the terrible crime of sitting up in my desk, was to have me stand on my tip-toes at the blackboard, where she would draw a circle in chalk by my nose, and make me stand there with my nose pressed to the board for thirty minutes in front of the entire classroom while she continued her lessons. Prayers were the norm throughout the school day and whether you liked it or not you were thanking Jesus for the privilege of receiving a public education in the State of Louisiana.

My worst experience was the fact that I had absolutely terrible eye-sight but my family did not have money to get me glasses. While I was in school I could not see well at all and I would always lean forward in my desk trying to see what was on the board. The teacher would scream and yell at me every time she caught me doing this; eventually sending me to the principals office and calling in my parents for disobeying her. You can see why my summer vacation was such a relief.

As I thought about these memories it occurred to me how sad it is that almost no one gets to enjoy the kind of summers we had when I was a kid. I know this post is going to start sounding like an old man reminiscing about 'the good old days when I was a young', but I think I have a point to make. Our world has changed remarkably and I often wonder how much of it is based on irrational fears and hysteria.

The changes in my own lifetime boggle my mind. Today a bunch of kids would not be allowed to roam freely for eight or ten hours without their parents knowing where they were at. We would leave early in the morning, maybe pack a bologna sandwich, and show up at dinner time hours and hours later. Often times we would climb trees so high, sometimes literally jumping from tree to tree, that had any adult seen us it is quite likely they would have had a heart attack on the spot. Nevertheless, we all survived completely intact. We would ride bikes, play baseball, explore the woods and creek, and even knock down wasps nest with the "Little Debbie" man.

This young man, who worked as a delivery person for Little Debbie snacks, was a great inspiration to us. He was not so old himself that he couldn't remember the fun of spending the day riding bikes and playing baseball. He encouraged us and was a great friend. He was generous and kind and had a lot of fun hearing about our adventures.

In today's culture I doubt someone like the Little Debbie man could exist. Such behavior would make people immediately assume he was a dangerous predator, pedophile, or worse. Heck, some people might wonder that the fond memory I have of the man is false as well, that he probably was up to no good. Let me assure you, at no point was there ever anything even remotely inappropriate in his behavior or conduct. He was just a young man who remembered how much fun it was to be a kid and how cool it was to have box loads of the best snack cakes in the world to share with the neighborhood.

This got me thinking about the radical changes in our culture and how it seems all of our innocence is lost. Today parents can't imagine not having constant contact with their child via a cell phone. All activities are highly structured and organized. There are no more pick-up games of baseball with a set of random kids roaming around the neighborhood. If a man was giving out free treats to all of the boys in the neighborhood he would probably be arrested and put in jail, rather than being respected by the community as a great role model for the kids.

In 1993 when the movie 'Dazed and Confused' came out, at the time I knew nothing about the director Richard Linklater. I went to see the movie in a packed theatre with my friend John Oberschelp. It was one of the greatest movies I had ever seen in my life. At times I laughed so hard it nearly hurt. Linklater got everything so spot on perfect it brought back a flood of memories from my own high school years which happened to be at the same time frame as was depicted in the film.

As we got up to leave what I thought was one of the greatest movies of all times I was shocked to hear so many teenagers in the crowd complaining about how much the movie sucked. It seems many of them couldn't relate to it at all. None of it seemed believable to them.

By then high school traditions had changed. Also, the movie does depict a high school in a rural community and the traditions between rural and suburban schools have always been very different.

Yes, when I went to high school the Juniors and Seniors spent a great deal of their time in shop class creating a master work of wood sculpture for the sole purpose of whacking the ass of every new incoming freshman. Yes, high schoolers knocked over mailboxes with a baseball bat just for the hell of it. They had impromptu keggers in the woods nearly every weekend. They would go cruising to find out where the best party location was going to be. In my high school the Seniors had their own, private, and well appointed smoking lounge, just for them. Not only were they allowed to smoke in High School but, also, the outside smoking area generally smelt more strongly of THC than nicotine.

I just read in the paper a week ago that a young man who accidentally came to school with a pocket knife in his, well, pocket is going to be charged with a felony!? When I went to school nearly every single boy carried a knife openly strapped to a sheath on their belt. I carried a pocket knife myself to school every day. Many of the young men at my school worked on farms and had been doing chores hours before they every arrived for classes. It was natural for them to carry with them a pocket knife which, at the time, was considered a tool, not a weapon.

Can you imagine today what would happen if a high school student showed up for class with a gun? However, when I went to High School more than a third of all of the young men who drove to school had a huge rack of guns hanging inside their truck every single day!

My purpose in pointing this out is just to gain a sense of appreciation for how much true freedom has been lost, especially in terms of how our youth live their lives. We will never return to those days but I honestly feel that something special has been taken away.

Is our culture too protective, too paranoid, that we can't just allow ordinary decent people to go about their day and not live in constant fear of some possible danger from a deranged individual? Today's high schools look like low security prisons. Metal detectors, police patrolling the hallways, and identification badges required.

I have no conclusions to draw here, I just think we have lost a lot of freedom in the past thirty years and nobody seems to have really noticed it along the way. It seems every level of fear, paranoia, and overbearing protection is justified so long as one evil act is possible by some deranged person in the world.

Personally, I would just as well continue to live my life like normal and if a deranged individual interrupts it, I would treat it with the same sense of fatalism I would reserve for a lightning strike. The risk probably being about equal.