Serendipity

I was home the day my father retired at age 65 after spending his whole working life as an electrician. That includes during WW II when he was in the “Seabees” unit of the U.S. Navy. He started his career with the Arkansas Power and Light as a young man fresh out of high school.

When I was about 11 years old, we moved to Ft. Worth Texas where he took a job at State Electric Co. and joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union. He worked at State for the rest of his career. About half of those years he was a Forman at large building projects in Ft. Worth that contracted State for the electrical work. State Electric was mighty good to my dad. He was injured when using a “gun” to shoot a nail into a concrete wall, turned around, and hit him in his left chest.

I was in the hospital with pneumonia, so we were both in the hospital at the same time. The “Ft. Worth Star-Telegram” ran a nice story about us. And, and this is a Big, State Electric kept paying my dad his salary during his hospital stay and recovery at home. Thanks, State Electric.

With the help of his pull, I worked for one summer as an electrician’s helper at the Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac plant in Arlington, TX, and I went to work with him every morning, but did not work as his helper. I worked for Brownie who was a great guy to work for. It was a good job, paying well, especially because we worked 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Twelve hours of overtime pay!

I was at home the day when he retired, he came in the door and said, “I through my pliers in the creek. I’m through.” And he was. He had several saying like that. For example, “He broke his plate with me” and “Once in a blue moon.”

Soon after his retirement, my parents bought a used motor home, which my dad tore apart and rebuilt the entire interior. As soon as it was travel worthy they took off, even taking my daughter on a long trip to places like Dolly World and the place you could dig for diamonds in Arkansas. My daughter, Shannon, still talks about how much fun she had on those trips with her grandparents.

My mother and dad ended up spending 4 months, for 15 straight years, in the same camping spot at a commercial campground in Lake City, Colorado. They timed it to get there on the 1st of June so my dad, we called “Pap,” could go fishing. Their stay there lasted until Oct. 1, when they headed home to Ft. Worth. Those months in Lake City were the happiest years of their lives. My mother took a job at Lake City Jewelers, not to make money, but to meet and talk to everybody. My dad went fishing almost every day. He had a small boat and motor that he kept at the campground.

During most of those years, I would visit them the last two weeks in September to be there during the height of the aspen fall foliage season. I didn’t stay in the commercial campground, staying in a Bureau of Land Management campground at Mill Creek. I took photos of the bright yellow aspens which you can see at pbase.com/johnchandler/colorado.

After Pap’s COPD got so bad that he couldn’t go to high altitudes (Lake City was at 8,600 ft.), they stopped going. After my dad’s death, my mother moved to the Austin area to be near me and my brother Jerry. She kept mentioning how much she missed seeing the fall foliage. She had an artificial heart and got to where she couldn’t go to high altitudes too.

So, one fall, I suggested we take a week-long trip to the NW corner of the Ozarks Mts. of Arkansas to see some fall foliage. So off we went. I rented a two-bedroom apartment in Jasper to act as a centrally located headquarters. As luck would have it, the apartment was right around the corner from a great, and somewhat famous restaurant, the Ozark Cafe, where we could have breakfast and dinner: A really good place.

One day we took a trip to Eureka Springs a super interesting town in the NW corner of the state. Driving back to Jasper we took a small country road out of Jasper and was driving along when we came to a bridge and river (the War Eagle River) with a red building on the other side. I stopped to take a picture, then we drove over the bridge.

It turned out that the red building was War Eagle Mill that had the “Bean Palace Restaurant on the 2nd floor. The first floor was full of packages of different grains they ground on their large stone grinder that was driven by a big water wheel and other interesting things. In the restaurant, they served a bowl of pinto beans with cornbread. I love pinto beans and cornbread. It was lunchtime…

…SERENDIPITY!

The only problem was my mother couldn’t walk up the stairs to the restaurant. So, the nice, very friendly folks at the mill sat up at a table overlooking the water wheel where we ate lunch. You can see the window above the water wheel in the photo. It was really, really nice. I liked it so much that I bought a blue and white speckled baking pan, and a package of their cornbread mix, and some of their pinto bean soup mix. That was over 20 years ago, and I’ve been ordering from them ever since, including their white bean soup mix, and their Cowboy mixed bean soup mix. What I'm talking about here could be defined as "good eating."

Serendipity, indeed.

The end.