Welcome to Our Southern Souls Sunday. I’m glad you’re here. This week’s stories are about Flip, train kids, and Coach Chris.

“I love kids and have a daughter. I wish I could have had about ten more, but there are a bunch of guys out there who call me Daddy or Coach. It feels good when people remember me and yell out, ‘Coach. Coach. Coach.’ Some told me if it wasn’t for me they would be dead or in jail.  A few of the kids who played for me are now police officers. 

I’ll never say I was a role model; I just did what was right.”

Click here to read Coach Chris’ story

Flashback

I’m always working on the next stories and projects, rarely reading stories after publishing them. My inner critic always sees something I missed or how I could have written it better. Looking for these Flashbacks has been a good reason to open these stories again: seeing their faces, remembering how I met them, and what I learned. Since Our Southern Souls, Vol. II starts hitting bookstores and mailing out this week; here are a few stories that I wish could have been included in one of the books, but I couldn’t track them down for permission.

“The car is a 1972 Ninety-Eight Oldsmobile. I have had it 25 years. It was my wife’s car. Her name was Margaret and she passed from cancer about three years ago…When we got married, our license was $5. One day Margaret was working in the hay field and it was hot, she said, ‘I am quitting this damn job,’ and I told her, ‘Woman, I’ve got $5 in you. You’ve got $3 to go.’ She grinned and said “I damn sure won’t.’ My name is Flip. My aunt gave me that name when I was six years old. It is already on the headstone next to Margaret’s.”

Click here to read Flip’s story

“We travel the country by freight train. The easiest way to jump on is to wait for it to stop and do a crew change on the side track on the outside of the yard. If you can count the three lug nuts on a freight train, you can catch it on the fly because it means it is going slow enough or you aren’t too drunk to catch it. Getting down, you want to be able to get down the ladder and jump and run off. The easiest way is to tuck and roll, but that hurts because there are rocks on the track and sometimes pieces of glass from broken bottles.”

Click here to read the train kids’ story

“I just had my 82nd birthday but I don’t know if I am going to make it to 83. I don’t do much but feed the birds. I used to like to fish, but I don’t do that anymore. I come out here to feed them every Sunday. I am the birdman of Fairhope and Pensacola. My name is Gordon, but they call me El Gordo because of my big belly.”

From Lynn

It’s book season! Boxes of Our Southern Souls, Vol. II get to my house tomorrow and I will get them to bookstores and a few gift stores this week. It’s 160 stories and 217 pages. They are stories about a man who could balance his entire body weight on one finger, a trusted advisor for an American President, and a young farm boy who left the fields at 18 for World War II combat. A football player whose NFL hopes were shattered by an injury that cost him part of his leg, and a woman who swam across Mobile Bay as part of her rigorous training to conquer the English Channel. There are powerful accounts of addiction, recovery, the birth and death of dreams, and losing—and finding—everything.

Here’s the link to buy the book. It’s $35 and the free shipping is my thank you for reading and caring about the Souls stories. All proceeds will be donated to the Magnolia Breeze Youth Ensemble, a therapeutic youth band in Mobile.

Here’s the list of book signings and author events.

Thank you for sharing a part of your Sunday with Souls. If you have suggestions for folks I should talk to, email me at [email protected].  Have a great week!

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