I use Google to see if I can find anything about some of the people from this class that I recall as former friends and classmates. I’ve generally tried to keep the topics in this blog that mention living people to a minimum in the interest of trying not to embarrass anyone with my memories of them in their formative years.
I think most of us would agree that the years we spent together so long ago were the years we spent forming our characters, for better or for worse. It was on each other that we experimented with a wide array of things—many of them better left to lay silent in the past.
Bobby, (he goes by Bob, these days), popped up on a recent Google search. As it was with Steve Means, a mutual friend, I do recall some things about Dillard I am sure that today’s Bob Dillard would rather not revisit—things of a juvenile nature. “Dillard” as he was known to most of us, was the gregarious kid, the one we elected to a lot of class popularity offices. If you still have one of our 1963 yearbooks, you will see Dillard pictured in nearly every club picture in that book…and he was even a member of some of those clubs! I think he saw picture day as a good opportunity to take the day off from classes, giving the excuse that he had to have his club picture taken...and taken...and taken again. One of the things we learned early in life was that the “authorities” often lacked the resources or the will to check the validity of every claim we might make. So we learned that a little BS went a long way...and in the art of BS, Bobby was very gifted.
Bob’s returns on my recent Google search included a 300-word email he had written to an online writer, who in turn posted it to the net. Dillard made a few Dillard-like statements in his message that indicate to me that he is not much different than the kid I recall, which on balance was a pretty good kid. His message started with, “my name is Bob Dillard and I’m in Fort Davis– just happened on your well done website and wanted to make a suggestion, one you might file in the big-damn-deal category.”
There followed something over 250-words registering Bob's understanding of the proper application of “Fort” or “Ft.” when referring to a place or an active military installation. In closing, Dillard wrote, “As for being on the web, we have just now gotten indoor plumbing so it may be a while before I can figure out how to do some of the things you are doing so capably.
That’s the “Dillard” I recall. Bob, if you stumble across this piece someday, be sure to read the next post, “More Damn Technology.”
Adios
3 comments:
Dillard was full of it. Good kid.
Dillard was the one who came up with that 1934 one-ton flat bed ford truck that we partially outfitted from the local road construction project. I don't think we ever found a muffler for that thing.
I traded some emails with Bob recently. They were some of the funniest, briefest information exchanges I've seen in recent memory. All Bob, and sharp as a tack.
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