TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Big-Brother Saga Reaches A Big Milestone

ADVERTISEMENT

By TOM JACKSON

Published: January 24, 2008

Self-help gurus and the leaders of 12-step plans are keen on declaring that "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Which is inspiring right up until the moment that you figure out that tomorrow, too, is the first day blah-blah-blah, so what's the hurry?

Except that some days do truly qualify as the first day of the rest of your life. Today is just such a day for the diligent, mild-mannered and uncommonly trustworthy, but otherwise anonymous, manager of a paint store in Lexington, Ky. Make that former manager of said paint store. Today, John David Jackson, first-born son of a loquacious hardware shopkeeper and his cerebral school teaching bride, turns 65.

Today, the federal government considers him a fully qualified member of America's burgeoning retiree class, eligible for all the honors, accolades, monthly checks, travel discounts and early bird specials thereunto appertaining. Undoubtedly, he will not allow the paint store's door to smack him in the bottom on the way out.

Fear not, Pasco members of the leisure set. John Jackson is not headed our way. He won't be elbowing anyone for space in line at the Zephyrhills Village Inn come Sunday, and he won't be holding up your foursome putting out gimmes on the 14th green at Plantation Palms. Although he and his wife of almost 40 years, the former Judy Williams of Del Rio Estates, came of age in Tampa, neither left town with sand in their shoes; instead, they became rooted like tulip poplars in north-central Kentucky.

Reducing His Jobs By Half

She, the former wasp-waisted, high-kicking dancerette at King High School, finished 20 years with GTE in Lexington before it became Verizon. He, KHS '61 and University of Kentucky alumnus, left his shop keys on the counter after more than 30 years behind the paint mixer. They have a house that's paid for and ambitions about travel but, like many other so-called pensioners, my brother's retirement merely reduces his number of jobs by 50 percent.

He's still the chief baker, packager and shipper for the Jackson Biscuit Co., the oldest continuous producer of a Southern specialty known as the beaten biscuit, a hard, crispy morsel without which, the tale goes, the Kentucky Derby cannot be staged. Some consider them the ideal accompaniment for country ham or hard cheese, and others regard //them// as more appropriately loaded into slingshots. But after Southern Living went and put a blurb about their company in the December issue, subsequent (and ongoing) orders ended any thoughts about wintering in the sunshine.

That's events for you, a condition John knows well.

The History Of A Time

When he arrived on this day 65 years ago, weighing in at a shade more than 7 pounds and measuring the standard 20-some inches, episodes even then were afoot angling to shape his earliest years. Across the Atlantic, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill concluded their historic Casablanca Conference by declaring that World War II would end only with the unconditional surrender of the Axis nations. Responding to a determined assault by the Soviet army against German forces in Stalingrad, an undeterred Adolf Adolph Hitler ordered his officers to fight to the death.

Such decisions precipitated the prolonged absence of his dad, who spent the better part of the next 33 months in northern Africa, slogging up the boot of Italy and, ultimately, joining the expeditionary force that inspected the abandoned Berchtesgaden getaway of old Fight-to-the-Death himself.

Philosopher, Hero, Chevy Man

By the time his father came home to northwest Tennessee, the tot had a head of blond curls, a conspicuously strong-willed toddler sister (calm down, months-counters; Pfc. Jackson had been home on leave before shipping out) and a nickname, Butch, that he resisted mightily.

At length, his parents, reunited, negotiated a compromise: Everyone would be ordered to stop using the disavowed nickname if he would stop calling them Dee and David. Thus did order, and the busy lad known as John David, emerge.

He was never a particularly big fan of school, but was gifted with his hands. He could draw or build most anything; if Jeb Bush had been in charge of Florida's secondary education in 1958, my brother would have declared a double major in art and shop. A wall-mounted desk he assembled as a junior was a fixture in our bedroom — later mine when he joined the Air Force — until I left for the University of Florida a dozen years later.

By the time I came along, lacking one day being exactly 10 years younger than my brother, Dad was a traveling salesman, gone most weekdays, and John became my hero and role model.

Two memories, both involving cars. When I had just turned 7, he and a high school pal took me to a science-fiction triple feature at the Fun-Lan Drive-In in his brown-and-cream 1954 Chevy Bel- Air. On a February night notable for its plummeting temperatures, I shivered under a quilt in the back seat while John and his buddy debated the relative merits of freezing or melting under a relentless sun.

A dozen years later, he loaned to me, barely out of high school and without hesitation, his late-model, grape-candy-colored, metal-flake Chevy Impala coupe with white faux-leather interior and a gigantic speaker scooped out of the back seat.

Closest Of Calls

I did not then, and I shall not now, reveal how close I came to wrecking it, attempting a U-turn in front of the 40th Street nursery where my high school girlfriend worked part time for her dad. Let's just say that older, wiser drivers were looking after me when my accidental doughnut concluded with the car pointing east-to-west on that north-south roadway.thruway.

And now, once again, my big brother is my hero, having crossed this particular finish line with his health and sanity intact, achieving this threshold moment in a manner that actuaries say bodes well for him tacking on yet another 30-odd years.

From a trailing member of the same gene pool, let me say this: Attaboy, John. Happy birthday, happy retirement. Happy first day of the rest of your life.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT