Since I climbed aboard that Greyhound “Silversides Super Coach” in Lumberton on my way to Navy boot camp in 1959, I’ve been blessed to play with the house’s money. I left home with stars in my eyes, and the Navy gave me many advantages that I’d only dreamed of – education, travel, adventure, and respect. I even learned about the Oxford Comma.
It was my first time to leave Mississippi, except for working trips to the French Market in New Orleans with my Daddy. He was a small-time truck farmer who raised and sold watermelons every summer. Once a week, when they were in season, we would load up his old blue, 47 Chevrolet two-ton truck with fresh-picked melons and head south down Highway 11. We’d leave about dark, often stopping at the White Kitchen Truck Stop at the intersection of 11 and Highway 90, just this side of the lake. I can still see its flashing neon sign: an Indian warrior, clad in a loin cloth, bending over a fire, and sending up florescent smoke signals. We generally stopped for the truck, not for us. It was always “outta:” outta water, outta oil, outta air, outta gas.
It was important to arrive at the Market just before dawn, because that’s when the neighborhood peddlers, mostly Italians, with their horse-drawn wagons would buy their produce for the day. If you were not there for the sale, you were stuck with your melons until the next morning. My old man was so tight it was hard to get a bottle of pop out of him. I will say this for him, though. He was a romantic. In 1951, the country singer, Lefty Frizzell, had a popular song, “Always Late.” Daddy paid an itinerate artist in the Quarter to paint “Always Late” on the bumper of our old watermelon truck. I was only ten years old, and I didn’t really get the “point,” but looking back, it summarized my daddy’s dour worldview at the time. He was a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy during World War II; was on Okinawa; had two ships shot out from under him; and never really found his way after the war. He later committed suicide, and some of the things I saw as a kid started to make sense. Fate always had its thumb on the scale as far as he was concerned.
The Market was totally different in those days. It was a wholesale operation, filled end to end with fresh fruit and produce, not the collection of nick-nacks, whirly-gigs, plastic purses, essential oils, and rude t-shirts it is today. In between loading the peddler’s wagons, I’d slip up the side of the levee to watch the ships pass on the river. It was at least twenty years before Creedence Clearwater Revival distilled the experience into “Proud Mary,” but I heard it even then:
Big wheel keep on turning,
Oh, the Proud Mary keep on burnin’
And we’re rollin,’ rollin,’ rollin,’
Rollin’ on the river.
But there I was, rolling out of Lumberton on the “grey dog;” smelling that fried chicken in greasy paper bags; hearing big wheels rolling in the night; sleeping with one eye open; holding tightly to the twenty-dollar bill in my pocket which was my total net worth. Ridiculously big cities flashed by the window, one after another: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, and then San Diego. A few months in boot camp, a year in electronics school in San Francisco, and then another bus to Boston enroute to a ship headed to three years in the Mediterranean. I was too dumb to realize it at the time, but I had “lucked” into probably the best duty in the Navy – a ship whose raison d’etre was to travel from one end of the Med to the other, from Gibraltar to Istanbul, from Nice to Haifa, projecting American sea power and “showing the flag” to friend and foe.
I’m familiar with the stereotype of the riotous, drunken sailor, with a girl in every port, but that wasn’t me. I guess I was a nerd. In fact, my shipmates often told me I was a nerd. I just had this pent-up desire to learn and to amount to something, not that they didn’t. I wanted to learn about other cultures and, although I had no talent, I wanted to learn about art. The only art in my home when I was growing up was the dapper Victorian, Prince Albert, all decked out with his top hat and cane, gracing my daddy’s red tobacco tin, and I decided to take advantage of the opportunities in the historic cities we visited. For example, several times when we went to Barcelona, I headed to the Pablo Picasso Museum.
I was interested in seeing his famous painting of “Guernica” (1937), a huge (11 ft tall x 25 ft wide), depiction of the catastrophic bombing of Guernica, a town in northern Spain that was destroyed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy warplanes at the request of Spanish Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco. Unfortunately, Franco’s forces won the Spanish Civil War; he hated the painting; and it was long kept for safekeeping in Chicago and New York City museums. It’s now in a Madrid Museum, and I never got to see it.
When you went ashore in Spain, you were warned not to mess with the guys in the funny black hats. The ‘tricornio,” or black, plastic tri-cornered hat formerly worn by the “Guardia Civil” (Civil Guard), was an icon of the Spanish police force that was founded in 1844 to maintain law and order in rural Spain. During the Franco era, (1939-1975), the Guardia Civil hat became an emblem of authoritarian power, due to the Guardia’s brutal repression of any opposition to Franco’s regime. To use a term you hear today, he “weaponized” the Guardia. In the early 1960’s, the James Bond movies were coming out, with 007 having a “license to kill.” The word on the street was that the Guardia really had such a license, answering only to the dictator, Franco, for their actions.
There’s an interesting legend that you hear about the origin of the tricorino. Supposedly, when Spain was invaded by Napoleon Bonaparte’s army in the early 19th century, some opposing patriots were lined up against the wall to be shot by the French. Refusing to be shot in the back, they stood tall facing their executioners, with the back of their hat brims pressed flat against the wall – hence the flat back of the tri-cornered tricorino. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
When Franco died in 1975, he was buried in the “Valle de los Caldos,” (Valley of the Fallen), which was officially only for those killed in the Spanish Civil War. After much political controversy, his body was exhumed in 2019 due to the now democratic government’s moves to remove all public veneration of his dictatorship. Ironically, the site was so associated with him that it was like removing Grant from Grant’s Tomb in New York City. Throughout Spain, however, everything associated with his repressive regime has now been publicly disavowed, revised, or renamed.
In our recent “woke” crisis, we’ve been on a “renaming” spree ourselves. In our race to eradicate any reference to the southern Confederacy, we’ve been renaming streets, schools, forts, etc., whatever somebody deems offensive. For example, New Orleans took the “Lee” out of Lee Circle. It is now Harmony Circle. The Defense Department has renamed all nine military forts across the nation that were named after Confederates. Fort Benning in Georgia is now Fort Moore; Fort Bragg in North Carolina is now Fort Liberty; Fort Hood in Texas is now Fort Cavaazos, and Fort Rucker, over in Alabama, is now Fort Novosel. The new names are good enough choices, Fort Rucker, for example, has been renamed in honor of Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael Novosel, an Army aviator who won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. On the other hand, if you don’t like your history, just rewrite it. Technically, the term is revisionism. Chief Warrant Officer 4 Novosel was a brave man, probably brave enough to keep Fort Rucker’s original name. When Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led India to independence in 1948, was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”
Whenever I drive my antique 1966 Fiat Cinquecento (500cc micro-car, which weighs 1100 pounds, with its two air-cooled cylinders pumping out a massive 18 horsepower), I’m reminded of the times I’ve seen dozens of them circling the Papal State in Rome, loaded down with husband, wife, two kids, mother-in-law, and a dog. They were Italy’s answer to the Volkswagen after World War II, and over 5 million were produced before significant model changes. There’s three ways for a sailor to get to Rome and the Vatican – through Civitavecchia, which is Rome’s port on the Mediterranean; fight the narrow, crowded streets in your or someone else’s Fiat; or you can take the train up from Naples – and I’ve done all three in the name of art.
The Vatican Museum has more than 20,000 sculptures, paintings, tapestries, and other items on display. Over 7 million visitors wander through its 20 acres of wall space each year. The Vatican gift shop sells more rosaries than anything else. I buy mine for my Fiat dashboard at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. The last time I was at Vatican City, the Japanese were renovating the Sistine Chapel for a television documentary, and some crackpot had just taken a hammer to the foot of Michelangelo’s statue of David. We can thank the Renaissance popes, half a millennium ago, for preserving many of the statues you see in the Museum. For centuries, the plentiful supply of ancient statuary unearthed in Rome had been burned for lime to make mortar. The wholesale destruction of such priceless treasures reminds me of stories about two famous statues with missing arms, one in Italy and one now in France.
One of the most famous statues in the Vatican Museum is that of “Laocoon.” From the first century BC, it was dug up in a vineyard near the Rome Colosseum in 1506, and Michelangelo was present for the excavation. In Greek mythology, Laocoon was the man who tried to warn his fellow Trojans about the gift of the wooden horse. Angry, one of the gods sent serpents to strangle Laocoon and his sons. All this is depicted in marble. When my ships passed through the Dardanelles Strait, on the way to Istanbul, I used to point out to anyone who was interested the reputed site of ancient Troy. Anyway, when they discovered the statue, the father was missing one of his arms. Wanting to restore it, the Pope, Julius II, aka the “Warrior Pope,” because he emulated Julius Caesar, held a competition and appointed Raphael, the painter and Michelangelo’s rival, as judge. Eventually, an arm was added, slightly bent, but reaching upward. Michelangelo, the skilled anatomist, was skeptical, believing instead that the arm must have been angled sharply behind his head. Four hundred years later, the missing arm was discovered, and Michelangelo was right.
Arguably the most famous statue in the Louvre, in Paris, is the Venus de Milo, which is missing both arms. It also has a very convoluted story, involving French sailors and the king of France. Believed to depict Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and to date from 150-125 BC, the statue was dug from a retaining wall by a farmer on the island of Milos, Greece, in 1820. A French ship was in port, and a passing sailor alerted his officer to the find who in turn notified the French ambassador in Turkey who provided funds to purchase it. It was brought to France, bought by King Louis XVIII, and installed in the Louvre where it remains today. Part of the statue’s mystique is that she is missing her arms, with much conjecture over the years as to their positioning: was she holding an apple? Was she leaning on a pedestal? Was she beckoning to a lover? Anyone can see where the arms were attached to the marble, including me. It’s up to your imagination beyond that.
The statue has also evoked some bizarre interpretations and inspirations. For example, in 1936 Salvador Dali created “Venus de Milo with Drawers,” a half-size plaster cast featuring several protruding half-opened drawers with brass knobs meant to display the “goddess of love as a fetishistic andromorphic cabinet with secret drawers filled with a maelstrom of mysteries of sexual desires that only a modern psychoanalyst can interpret.” It’s too bad we can’t ask her what she’s really thinking. It’s just as true with the Mona Lisa, which is right down the hall.
Just to show that it’s not a random world, that there is order in the universe, I was talking last week to the new owner of the old bus station in Lumberton. A teacher at the high school, and a believer in the potential of Lumberton, he told me that he and his wife have a goal to turn the former “Greyhound” building into a non-profit art center, where anyone can come to create, learn, and enjoy. What a wonderful idea and how strange. What I left home to find – ended up being there all along.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
