The first leg of my whirlwind, “Dogs across S.C.” or “Tucker and Gracie’s Excellent Adventure” tour (I should totally pick a definitive name for this project) was in our home county of Union. Obviously I’ve walked my dogs in my neighborhood which is in Union plenty of times, but part of the point of doing this is to talk to whoever we might encounter and allow my faithful hounds (and myself) to see some new sights. Downtown Union isn’t new to me, since I spent four years working at a Main Street business, spent a couple of years going to a school at a location just off Main Street and drive down the road occasionally. I'd be a block over from the mill my dad worked in, a mile as the crow flies from the place I was born and the apartment my wife spent our first two years of marriage living in and would be very near a monument honoring Korean war dead that features my uncle's name. Sometimes, though, the most familiar of areas turn into the visual equivalent of background noise. You’ve seen them so often that your focus isn’t as keen and subtle changes slip by unnoticed. This would mark the first time I’d really soaked in downtown in a while.
I parked, got Tucker and Gracie out and was promptly dragged behind them for the first few minutes of our walk. Seriously, I looked like the carcass of Sherman McMasters tied to the horse in “Tombstone.” I’m a big guy by most any measure (standing almost 6’2 and weighing between 200 and 210 pounds depending on what I’ve had to eat that day) but combined they are pretty close to me weight-wise, they’ve got eight legs to my two and they have fairly boundless energy. We started off walking from the parking lot, through a breezeway to Main Street. We passed the bank where my aunt worked for years and where I’ve deposited my INCREDIBLY FAT radio and newspaper paychecks (HAHAHA LOLOL) since I was 18. A sign on the door indicates that said bank has moved to better serve customers…a nice way of saying “we closed this branch, so y’all can drive your butts to Spartanburg.” We hung a right (well, my dogs did and I just kind of hung on) and it didn’t take long until I saw someone I knew…Lindsey, who lives in our neighborhood and who used to let Tucker and Gracie out and would take them for short walks while my wife and I were at work. She’s in college now and looked like she was leaving school for the day. I waved, but then heard a voice from across the street. “Hey. What kind of breed are they?” a guy asked. “This one (I pointed to Tucker) is a Goldendoodle. This one (I pointed at Gracie) is a Labradoodle,” I said. “I’ve got a Golden myself. They’re great dogs,” he said. We crossed the street and turned to walk back in the other direction. That gave us, in fairly short order, an across-the-street view of my one-time place of employment, WBCU radio. I played Garth Brooks records, ran the board for Atlanta Braves games (when an actual person had to be sitting there to play commercials and legal IDs), broadcast Union and Jonesville High athletics, presided over radio auctions and daily meat drawings and was renowned as the best reader of obituaries in the station’s history (by a lady in Carlisle, which seems as legitimate a source for such a title as any) in my four years there. I could see the precise spot upon which I stood as I did my part of the coverage of the Olympic torch being carried down Main Street on it’s way to Atlanta in 1996. As memory serves, that event was capped off locally by a Confederate Railroad concert at Union County Stadium, because nothing says national pride and the spirit of competition quite like “Daddy Cut the Big One,” I guess. (I will admit to liking “Queen of Memphis” and “Trashy Women” don’t judge me). Had a lot of great times in that building and some of the stories from there are all-timers. A lot of interesting folks came in and out of those doors during my time there. To quote a Robert Earl Keen song I played over the AM 1460 frequency, “one’s in Hollywood, one’s a millionaire, some are gone for good, some still livin’ here.” I should note that Mr. Keen decidedly did not fit the “Garth, Reba, Vince, Lonestar, Alabama” format…but Eric Clapton and CCR aren’t religious artists and I sure enough played them on the early Sunday morning gospel caravan show when I knew the boss wasn’t listening too so… Man, if those walls could talk… A. that’d actually be pretty scary because holy crap talking walls and B. not every story is meant to be shared, particularly on a semi-family friendly meat and football blog and also since the statute of limitations may not have expired. That’s not a throwaway line…”A Current Affair” and sedation dentistry supplies figure into some of the stories and I’m not even kind of kidding. Near as I can tell, they still do things the right way in terms of what’s on the air there, keeping it local. That’s probably why they’ve succeeded where so many other stations have failed over the last 20 years. And if they ever need a certified obit reader in a pinch, I might know a guy. We then made it all the way down to the Union County Courthouse, which represented the first real patch of grass we’d seen on our walk. I don’t know about your dogs, but mine are fairly particular about where they do their business. They won’t go on concrete, they (thankfully) won’t go on floors…they must have grass upon which to relieve themselves. Tucker saw all that lush green foliage and jumped from the sidewalk to the top of the small wall that separates the courthouse yard from the pavement. He walked into the grass and Gracie, as she often does, copied what he did. “Tucker, please do me the favor of not taking a dump on the front yard of the courthouse,” I said. He actually complied and Gracie, to whom such pleas sometimes fall on deaf ears, actually followed suit. We crossed the street again and headed back in the other direction. One lady made an obvious effort to avoid us, though she did manage a kind of nervous smile. I guess some people are afraid of dogs, especially large ones, but how in the world could anyone be afraid of Tucker and Gracie? They look like extras from “The Great Muppet Caper.” It’s like having a crippling fear of Fozzie and Rowlf. Maybe she was afraid of me. That would be more understandable. The next person we encountered, a gray-bearded man on a bike, was decidedly different. “I love puppy dogs,” he announced as he petted them both. Normally, nothing distracts Tucker from seeing new sights in a new location, but attention does the trick. We took him to Washington D.C. once and as I walked him in front of the White House he actually posed for pictures with people. There was, no exaggeration, a small line of people waiting to have their pic taken with him at one point. It’s like he was the president’s dog or something. He dutiful sat and posed with his adoring public. “Aw man, this picture is gonna blow up on Facebook,” a teenage kid said that day as he threw his arm around my dog and gave a thumbs up. Gracie lives very much in the moment, so if she sees somebody she’ll just bop right on toward them hoping they’ll pet or in some way acknowledge her and if they don’t, she turns and keeps walking unfazed. This guy didn’t ask for any pics, he just told me that he has a rescue dog he got from Florida (a Pit mix) that is gentle and loves children. “He’s the sweetest boy ever,” he told me. He thanked Tucker and Gracie for their time and pedaled off. A woman then approached. “Do you know whose doll babies those are?” she asked, pointing at three abandoned toys sitting on a bench. They were obviously not mine and I thought it best that Tucker and Gracie not be allowed to get ahold of them, so I kept walking. Tucker can’t have cute stuffed toys because he destroys them. He’ll hone in on a weak spot and just gnaw until he can get the stuffing out. Oh, and Lord help us if it’s a squeaky toy, because he’ll extract the little squeaky noisemaker thing and try to eat it. We’ve bought him toys that we were assured could hold up to any level of canine abuse that didn’t last a day. A stuffed doll baby in a pretend diaper wouldn’t stand a chance. We eventually made our way to USC-Union. I noticed during our walk that many of the Main Street establishments whose commercials I played on the radio back in the 1990s were no longer in business and in some cases nothing has come in to replace what has been lost. I was happy to see, then, how much my old alma mater has grown. When I was a student there, it was comprised of two buildings. Two. Now there are four or five, there’s a college shop on Main Street, there is student housing and USC-Union fields teams in multiple sports. Some of the kids I covered as prep athletes in baseball, softball and soccer are now Bantams, competing against fairly high-level JuCo opponents. I think there was a co-ed, club softball team when I went there. I didn’t necessarily shoot my best shot academically and missed on some opportunities I shouldn't have when I went there, but I did leave with a couple of associate degrees, the foundation to go finish up my fancy book learnin’ elsewhere and was lucky enough to have a couple of professors I still consider friends…ones who actually gave a damn about their students…ones who not only tolerated a term paper/speech on Spam (the canned meat, not unwanted email solicitations), but gave me an “A” on it. Look at the place now. It’s thriving and I’m proud and I hope that the street Tucker, Gracie and I walked will thrive along with it soon. “Hey, that’s where I went to school,” I told my dogs. Before you ask…yes, I talk to my dogs, yes they are smart and often understand me and no they do not answer me. The history of people who think their dogs are talking to them, um, isn’t terribly positive. By this time, we’d been walking for at least an hour and Tucker and Gracie were finally on the verge of tapping out. The temperature was starting to spike and they plopped down in some shade. I figured we’d done enough, so I roused them from their little break and we started to head back toward the car. We passed three people standing outside a business who, I think, might have been taking a smoke break. One of them (a lady who was seated) petted Gracie on the head but didn’t say anything, one fellow looked a little scared, but the other greeted us. “Boy, those are some big dogs,” he said. “They sure are pretty, though.” We chatted for a minute and he eventually asked my name. I told him, but then got the response that I almost always get in those situations. “Hmm. Travis Jenkins. Seems like your name is familiar. Who was your daddy?” he asked. When I’m in Union, where I live but don’t work and thus don’t spend a whole lot of time, I’m often identified as “Randy’s boy” or even “Ashley’s husband” (since she’s a teacher and knows most everybody). In Chester, where I work and people theoretically at least know who I am, I’m still often “Donna’s kid” or “Lynly’s brother” or “that (bleepity bleep) from the newspaper.” I’m not super fond of that last one, but I’m more than cool with being known by who my family is, If you knew my dad or know my mom (or wife or sister), you know that it’s a compliment, actually. He and I shook hands and I got back to the parking lot to load the dogs up and take them home. It was a worthwhile trip. I got to relive some good memories and get an up-close look at a downtown I should be more familiar with than I apparently was. We didn’t encounter a lot of people, but we didn’t pass one person too absorbed in their phone not to at least smile or say hello. We did pass two joggers with ear buds in, but even they waved. It was nice people in a nice little downtown. A really good place to walk your dogs…and yourself.
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TravisI am Travis, the king 0f SC 1A Football Archives
November 2021
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