A New Jersey cracker

My sister Dorothy was the oldest in our family. After graduating from high school, she just stayed around home until WWII broke out. She lived to be 96 and never learned to drive.

She went to Wapato to live with our aunt and worked in some related war effort job there.

She met her husband, Wes, while there. They later married and, being in the army, he was reassigned to Jackson, Mississippi.

He was there until the war ended and they moved on to New Jersey to live.

A few years later, my sis talked her husband into driving west to see the family.

He apparently watched too much TV because as soon as they hit the Montana line he was on alert to be confronted by Wild West outlaws, the same on their return home.

A few years later, we attended a newspaper convention in Atlanta, Georgia. When it concluded, we flew up to Vineland, New Jersey to visit.

Wes was a lineman with a telephone company and climbed poles.

We arrived in Vineland midday, and when Wes got off work he said, “Let’s go down to Tiny’s.”

Tiny’s was a beer place a few minutes away from the house. When we walked in I could tell by how Tiny and Wes greeted each other that this was a frequent thing.

Well, Tiny wasn’t tiny. He probably tipped the scales at 350-400 pounds.

We sat at the bar and Tiny poured a couple of glasses of beer. I took a sip to be polite. Wes downed his, and Tiny put two more glasses in front of us. 

Tiny could have played in the NFL, except his quickness was confined to pouring beer.

In a moment, Wes had drained his second glass and Tiny had two more glasses in front of us. Wes drained that gass and seemed pleased that I offered all the extra glasses in front of me to him.

Now Wes was possessed by a great thirst, and even took my glass I had sipped from and downed it.

I was relieved when he said we needed to go back home for dinner, but not before he ordered a six pack to go.

Wes was a small guy and couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. I thought he must have a hollow leg to consume so much beer.

After dinner, we sat and visited, and Wes announced the six pack was gone. I dreaded the thought that we were going back to Tiny’s.

We didn’t, and the next day we went to D.C.

I had made arrangements to meet up with Lloyd Meeds, our congressional member from the 2nd district, where we lived.

Lloyd invited us to have lunch with him in the House dining room. Our elected officials really know how to take care of themselves. During lunch, Wes kept making remarks about elected officials and I couldn’t shut him up, causing Lloyd to say, “Where did you get this cracker?”

We later went to the Smithsonian, where Wes refused to go inside stating that if you’d seen one museum you had seen them all.

That was pretty much how it went. We did return to Tiny’s, where I got my picture taken with him.

It wasn’t only a few months at home before I met up with Lloyd Meeds again, and the first thing he asked was how my New Jersey “cracker” friend was.

A couple of years later, we agreed to drive to Houston, Texas to visit my brother David. My sister and her husband would drive and meet us there.

She had asked Wes to take a different route home so she could see more of the country, only later to say all she saw on the way home was the other side of the road.

I saw Wes and my sister on another occasion when we drove to the east coast to visit our oldest daughter Kathy and her husband who were living in Baltimore at the time. 

It was only a short drive to my sister’s place, so we went down. No Tiny’s on this trip. But we did talk Wes into driving us into the Piney Barrens, where it was said that the New York mafia would dump the people they killed.

The barrens were a swampy area and very few people lived there.

We got about a quarter mile inside the barrens and Wes refused to go farther.

Now all “crackers” don’t live in New Jersey, but Lloyd Meeds was right about this one.