The Unmuddled Mathematician

Spaulding and the Flints and a Final Thought on Pot Guts

By Chris Coray, The Unmuddled Mathematician

When I was a young boy we lived next to the main cemetery in Salt Lake City.  Really close, as in 50 yards.  We used some of the wide-open spaces with no graves as our playground.  There was even a greenhouse in one section operated by my best friend’s dad.  Sometimes I would mow grass and help in the greenhouse. 

On Memorial Day hundreds, if not thousands, of people would travel into the cemetery to decorate and dress graves.  My friend’s dad would let us take some live potted petunias out to the gate and sell them for what we could get to people driving into the cemetery.  At the end of the day we got to keep the money.  For a 10 year old kid it was hard to imagine what to do with all the loot, which on one occasion totaled $14.00.  In one day! That was serious money in those days.

The day after Memorial Day I would get on a bus and go downtown to State Hardware.  The money was burning a hole in my pocket.  I would ask to see the flint marbles.  For those of you who don’t know, the flint was the marble you used as your shooter.  In games of competition your flint was never part of any wager.  We used cheap glass marbles for those.  The flint was sort of like your baseball glove or your special bat.  Anyway, the merchant at the store would open the drawer of his flint cabinet and nestled on maroon velvet was a collection of flint marbles.  They were beautiful and the only difference between those and the crown jewels of England was scale.  After carefully handling each I selected the one that fit my fingers the best and was also the most beautiful.  This marble cost about $2.00 but the bounty had to be spent.  I kept all my flints in my special box of treasures.  With lots of use the flints would appear to get small impact curves just under the surface.  We called them moons.  The basic drill was to take the mooned flints and bury them in mom’s Crisco can overnight which seemed to make the moons disappear.  The moons came back after the grease on the flint dried out and my mom somehow managed to live with the dirty finger tracks and marbles in her Crisco.  Life was good and I hadn’t yet spent all of the Memorial Day loot.

The next stop would be the sporting goods store next to the marble place.  There I would buy a small cubic box, not more than 3 inches on a side.  In the box, wrapped in actual soft tissue paper, was a brand new Spaulding baseball.   The cost was just over $2.  They were beautiful and they even had a great smell.  Maybe it was the horsehide cover.   Not a scratch mark anywhere.  I would take the ball home and put it carefully in my Mickey Mantle glove (you never put your glove away without a ball in it).  We were extraordinarily careful playing catch with the new ball, for no one wanted to put the first ding in the surface (sort of like driving a brand new car).  Inevitably, the ball hit the ground hard and then we had just a really good used ball.  Life actually got easier as we stopped worrying and just played.  And I still had 10 bucks in my larder to buy presents for members of my family on special occasions.  I had an ideal childhood.

On a final topic, I’ve decided to open my own fast food place here at Bear Lake.  We’ve got a bunch of hamburger/milkshake places with big lines.  My idea is to offer a new specialty, i.e. the pot-gut squirrel kebab. No locals need to eat them since we will be too busy trying to find ways to eliminate them legally.

There are so many this year I thought that there must be a use for them. I thought we’d just put them on a skewer, barbecue them up to crispy, and offer the out of town buyer one of just two options (this to keep the line moving fast).  The two options would be head first or tail first.  Salt, pepper, and condiments to suit your taste. 

Are you wishing by now that either I had stopped writing after the baseball or you had stopped reading there?