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A Glimpse Of The Cleverest Generation

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By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: January 9, 2009

A group of seven or eight men get together for lunch every Wednesday in the back room at the Valencia Garden restaurant. They are older than dirt. Buck Setzer, who just turned 94, asked me to join them last week.

The stories are always good and sometimes true. The conversation usually drifts back to whatever the good old days were around here, although politics almost always slips in.

Sam Gibbons is a regular in the group and the question to him was about the upcoming inauguration in Washington and whether he would be going.

Gibbons, who spent 34 years in Congress, looked up from his cup of Spanish bean soup and said there was no way he wanted to be a part of that chaos. "It's always too cold up there anyhow," he added.

He reminisced about all those years of driving back and forth to Washington, long before the coming of interstates, and said he didn't miss that, either.

Cows On The Road
Setzer remembered when you had to watch out for animals on the road. Florida Gov. Fuller Warren, he said, even campaigned on the promise he would get the cows off the road. That reminded Gibbons of his own experience with a cow.

The year was 1946. Gibbons was back from World War II and those incredible experiences on D-Day, when he jumped with the 101st Airborne into a French swamp along with those two cans of Schlitz beer he had stuck in his gas mask. But you've heard that story.

Now it's 1946 and Gibbons has just married Martha and gone to Daytona Beach for a brief honeymoon.

"We were actually on our way back to Gainesville and the University of Florida," he said in that slow drawl of his. "I had a 1941 Plymouth that I had put all of my money in.

"Of course it was late and we were out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere east of Palatka, I think, but you have to remember this was back when there weren't any lights at night and you had to be careful on those two-lane roads."

Apparently the newlyweds weren't careful enough, and Gibbons didn't see the cow until the Plymouth struck it, sending the cow up into the air and landing on top of the car. The cow didn't make it, but fortunately neither Gibbons nor his bride was hurt.

"But we were stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a cow on the roof and the fenders jammed into the tires so we couldn't move anyhow. I had no idea where the nearest town might be."

The 1st Drive-Through

That's when a truck came down the road and four men jumped out. "Each one grabbed a leg of the cow; they put it into the back of their truck and they drove off. You have to remember that this was 1946 and there still was rationing going on. That cow was worth a lot of money."

They were still were stuck in the middle of nowhere, but Gibbons took out a small ax he had in the back of the car and hacked off the fenders. "The lights didn't work, either, but I had a small flashlight, so I took that out and we crawled down the road. If someone approached I would jump out and wave the flashlight around."

The good news was that they had insurance.

"I had a $50 deductible. Fortunately Martha had $50 her father had given her to take on our honeymoon in case I turned out to be bad news and she could catch the bus back home. That helped pay for our car."

I don't know if his was the greatest generation, but it had to have been the most resourceful.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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