My great uncle Willie was ahead of his time even if everybody who knew him thought he was strange.
The oldest brother of my dad’s father, Uncle Willie stayed in a little shack behind my grandparents’ house in Bogalusa.
That South Louisiana community across Pearl River from Mississippi was a long way from my hometown of Springhill.
We usually made the all-day drive once a year over crooked two-lane roads for brief visits with my dad’s folks.
Those jaunts invariably included momentary encounters with Uncle Willie. He would appear out of nowhere, toss a handful of peppermint sticks toward the kids and retreat to his backyard shanty.
There was a little bedroom and bathroom in a back corner of my grandparents’ sprawling wood frame house. Uncle Willie came in late at night, slept there and left before daylight.
He never joined us for meals, but my grandmother always left him a plate of food on the kitchen counter. It would disappear without us ever seeing Uncle Willie coming or going.
Despite our curiosity about him as youngsters, we were never offered any information on Uncle Willie’s personal life, work history or other circumstances of his unusual existence.
Kinfolks who lived around there and knew Uncle Willie just referred to him as “eccentric.”
I told my friend Tom Murchison about Uncle Willie. He said there was an unconventional uncle like that in his family, and people called him “peculiar” instead of eccentric.
Because of a big misunderstanding with my high school math teacher when I didn’t think I needed to show up for classes and she did, I flunked math my junior year.
Unable to face the shame of their son not graduating with his class, my parents arranged for me to take the class in summer school in Bogalusa. Springhill didn’t have summer school.
So I stayed with my grandparents for several weeks and went to school an hour a day.
I had a 10-year-old Ford and drove the green, sputtering clunker the couple of miles to school and back every morning.
Without fail, rain or shine, Uncle Willie would be walking along the road from my grandparents’ house on the outskirts of town to the business district where the school was located.
He wore khaki pants that were too short and a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the top even in the summer heat. The scuffed, brown leather things on his feet were either high top shoes or low quarter boots.
I stopped when I saw him on my way to school that first morning and offered him a ride.
He shook his head that he didn’t want to ride and kept walking briskly with his eyes straight ahead.
A few days later, he flagged me down as I was about to pass him. He stood at the window and talked for a minute.
He said he told people who asked about his daily, hour-long walk that he was going to the post office to get the mail but that he was really “walking for the exercise.” Mail was delivered to the box in front of my grandparents’ house.
Uncle Willie said he kept a 10-foot cotton rope on a nail in his shed and did “some rope jumping” every day to get his heart rate up.
That might be considered pretty normal these days, but it was downright weird in the 1950s before gyms, health clubs, personal trainers and other aspects of the physical fitness craze.
My granddad didn’t seemed concerned that his elderly brother was a recluse who stayed in a shed and that neighbors and family members never knew if he had been married, had children or ever held a job.
But he thought it was bizarre that Uncle Willie walked and jumped rope “just for the exercise.”
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES