Buddy's Blog

This was in my neighbor’s back yard yesterday evening. They’re adolescents.

Tomorrow is our often postponed Manatee High School Class of ’62 reunion. My house. Where else?

Hello there. If you’re interested, I’ve been working on revising my single panel books. That’s why I’ve been so busy. I’m almost finished. Just my What’s New in Science book to go. I still have yet to redraw a couple cartoons. I’ve finished the other two books, and I’ve changed the printer to Amazon, but I haven’t yet released them yet. I’ll release all three at the same time. So if you’ve been thinking about getting one of them, wait for a while.

Please play the music as you read …

Sid is about to meet his life-long beloved companion…

Dr. Pork has a hard time diagnosing this patient’s ailment:

That’s what Robert R asked in Comments yesterday when he saw my adorable baby picture:

This is U-No-Hoo at 20 months:

 Does that answer your question, Robert? I remember my mother taking this picture of me. I can still hear her saying “Cover your pee- pee, Buddy”.

Snapping turtles are the meanest critters on the face of the planet. Before we moved to Florida, my old man’s favorite thing was hunting snapping turtles in the swamps of New Jersey near Swedesboro. All he used was a metal rod with a hook on the end of it and a big wooden crate to put the turtles in. He would always bring me back a little box turtle. He caught the snappers for fun. Only once did he bring one back to cook. He cut off the head and the head kept trying to take your finger off well into the next day. Here’s a picture of me and Billy Drake on the crick (Back then it wasn’t a “creek”. It was a “crick”) down behind our house.

That boat we’re floating in was my father’s snapping turtle crate. My mother’s note at the bottom is wrong. My father died in 1958. I was just a kid. Years later I learned from my cousin, Barb, whom I mentioned yesterday, that my father’s wish was to have his ashes spread in the swamp where he hunted the turtles. When my mother passed in 2004 I took her ashes up to the family plot in Wilmington, Delaware, and I spread my father’s ashes in the swamps of New Jersey.

This is U-No-Hoo along with my cousin Bob and my sister, Roberta, holding my baby cousin, Greg, and a pretty mean looking dead diamondback.

This was in 1957 not long after we moved into the house that my father built in Bradenton Beach, Florida. It was just a little way south of the trailer park where we had lived  for seven years. I remember that we had just come home from school. Between our house and the trailer park was the half jungle half flats which was under water quite often. Along the bay side it was all mangroves. My father saw the snake crawling out of the ditch onto our hard packed driveway. He grabbed a gig and pinned it. My older cousin, Barb (18 years my senior) lived in the little house that her husband built across the shell road. My cousins in the photo were her kids. My father had the rattler pinned down. He was sort of stuck there. He yelled to Barb who fortunately happened to be home. “Barb! Bring your gun!” She said that she was so scared that it took her three shots to hit it. I love that picture. Here’s my old man:

You can see that the snake’s head was pretty much blown away. The is me…