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Driving through the backroads of Missouri over the weekend as I do every weekend, I saw something that triggered a memory from my childhood and it’s one that I’ve had for very long time. What prompted it was a couple of kids smoking cigarettes on the side of a building, and you may think “yeah,so what”.. the memory wasn’t of smoking (which I did for several decades but am smoke free for almost 8 years now) but of a janitor in a grade school.

Garland was probably about 65-70 years of age in 1969 and like most kids growing up the the Decade of Love, we didn’t care too much for it, we just wanted to be like the big kids, smoke cigarettes, weed and look at girls. Garland would let us in the school to sit around and smoke Winston’s and drink those 10oz Coke’s from the teachers lounge (.15cents,, seriously it was 1969). Garland smoked Pall Malls non-filtered and would laugh as we tried them and coughed and hacked from their harshness. He would tell us stories of growing up and rolling his own from the scraps he swept off the floor from the tobacco factories in North Carolina.

He moved to Virginia Beach when he was 20 to take a job as horn player in a small combo that played the beach house parties every summer, always going home to Carolina in the fall and winter for harvest and then back to Virginia during the summer to play and eek out a living. He was a very kind soul, he showed us how to run the floor wax machine without banging the walls, how to mop a floor without leaving a streak, and how to eat an orange without getting the juice all over your hands (try it sometime). In the next couple of summers, we started seeing less and less of Garland, we were growing up and our attention was drawn to the War in Vietnam, the music of Mott The Hoople, Deep Purple, Led Zepplin and the looks of girls in halter tops and hot pants. By 1974, I’d all but forgot Garland when I happened to be walking near the school on a warm summer afternoon and he stopped, smiled and waved, some how recognizing me from a few years back, now a little taller, a lot skinnier and mostly awkward teenager. We chatted, smoked and had a cold coke. That was the last summer I saw him, I moved north to Maryland with my family that fall and to this day will always remember the massive but gentle man that helped me become part of the person I am today. In a turbulent late 60′s and early 70′s the racial tensions were always high but you would have never known this to be around this gentle man. He told us hooligans once, “it doesn’t pay to hate”.. words to live by even today.