For your reading enjoyment, we continue to publish Rambling Vines by the late Marylea Vines as she re-calls events and names of Corning folks from many years ago. We are currently in the year 1992

The 4th of July Cadillac has been ordered, and things are beginning to shape up for our big annual celebration at Wynn Park. Billy Allen is chairman of the Cadillac committee and Mike Jackson is general chairman of the event… they need our help between now and the big day. Make it a point to see them and pledge your support. The profits go to a lot of worthy causes right here in Corning.

A former classmate, Lorene Wright Johnson, of Rockford, Illinois, called the other day. It has been many a moon since we competed in those exciting Friday afternoon spelling matches at Elementary School… and those games such as “New Orleans,” “Pleased or Displeased,” and “Hopscotch,” we all enjoyed at recess. Lorene was a good student in every sense of the word… she was organized and always had whatever she needed in the way of paste, crayons, ink pens, erasers, pencils, and she never lost her homework assignment on the playground. I started the year off with all those things, but either traded them off or tore them up the first few weeks… I liked to see how the Eversharp worked, then it would never go back together. That bladder inside those oldtime ink pens fascinated me and I was never happy until I took mine apart and ended up with ink all over my hands and a forever leaky pen. Anyway, it was nice to chat with Lorene about others we recall growing up together at that old two-story brick schoolhouse. We talked about Ruth Long, Zelda Bailey, Vona Mae Penter, Mary Christine LaRoe, Alta Romine, Julie Mae Tracy, and a lot of others. I still say that if everyone who ever lived in Corning would come back, we could be bigger than New York City!

Have you paid any attention to the fact that the days are gradually getting longer? Especially noticeable in the evening.

Every day, every single day I get some mail about health insurance… I’ve even considered (not seriously) taking my mailbox down to get it stopped. The crowning blow came the other day when I got home from work, open the mailbox to find a card about bargain burial insurance for seniors and before I could get my coat off, the telephone was ringing. There I stood still holding the burial insurance “bargain” when the voice on the other end started telling me about a Medicare supplement that I need. I warned that his timing was bad but that I was curious about how I could get a Medicare supplement when I wasn’t even on Medicare!

The thing that bothers me most is that people have no privacy any more… used to the FBI was the only place that had access to such files… nowadays everyone’s life is an open book, coast to coast. I’m not so sure I like that. I have no secrets, but I sort of like to call the shots when they concern me.

The tulips along our front walk at home are beginning to poke their heads through the top of the ground.

February is birthday month for both Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Tommy Grayson. I especially remember Tommy’s February 22nd birthday because there would be a party with cherry pie for dessert. I also remember something that Richard Rogers said in the classroom many years ago on February 22… He announced that “Today is George Birthington’s wash day.”

When we were in high school, we had this science teacher who left at the end of one school term and returned the next with a mustache… something we just didn’t see very often around here. We did a lot of snickering behind his back, but no one was brave enough to say anything for several weeks. We were just completing a unit of study on dams, the ideal locations for dams and their purpose. The mustached teacher was asking questions at random to see how much we had retained. His mistake was in asking Richard, “Where is the best place to locate a dam site?” As expected, Richard quickly replied, “Right behind the teachers desk.”

I may get to serve on jury this month. At least I have my “foot in the door,” so to speak. I’ve been a registered voter since way back in Poll Tax days and this is only the second time that I have even been considered for jury duty. I think that every person should serve on a jury at least once during their lifetime in order to have a better understanding of what really goes on in court. Besides that, it’s our duty. But, of course, if they never call you, there’s not much of a chance of getting to serve. An older person was telling me not long ago about being selected for jury duty. He said that they sat through a trial and when they went back to the jury room to make a decision, one of them stated, “Okay, if anyone knows what we are supposed to do, let’s do it.” … That’s sad, all of us should, by the time we are adults, know and understand how our court system works.

They tell me that if we don’t get some more cold weather, ice and snow that the mosquitoes will “eat us up” this Summer. Really now, can they be much worse than they have been? Dinosaurs are popular again. I remember way back in the 1930’s when Sinclair Oil Company used dinosaurs in the advertisements and about once a month the local agent would come to school and leave sketches of dinosaurs which we were to color as a learning process. I hated it because I was afraid of dinosaurs and each time I had to color one of the pictures, I had nightmares.