Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Garden of Eden Orchards

One of the great things about going for a walk is that your mind just wanders off on its own. You never know what it will bring back.

Today as I was walking, a phrase popped into my head that I haven’t thought of in decades: gooper feathers. As a very little girl, I liked to watch my father shave. When he was done, he would show me how soft his cheek was. He would say, “See: gooper feathers.”

I have no idea why I thought of that today. But I had to go to Google and see what I could learn. Here’s all I found about gooper feathers: “The fuzz from peaches, according to an Amos ‘n’ Andy phonograph record from the late 1920s or thereabouts.”

Two other old-timey things got looked up today. After I said to Bob, who was getting into the up elevator when he wanted to go down, “Wrong-way Corrigan,” he looked the guy up.

You can click on the NY Times and Wikipedia learn about Corrigan. Here’s Wikipedia: “an American aviator born in Galveston, Texas. He was nicknamed ‘Wrong Way’ in 1938. After a transcontinental flight from Long Beach, California, to New York, he flew … to Ireland, though his flight plan was filed to return to Long Beach. He claimed his unauthorized flight was due to a navigational error … He had been denied permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland, and his ‘navigational error’ was seen as deliberate.”

That train of thought led me to One-Eyed Connelly. My father used to call a rather bold pigeon of his acquaintance One-eyed Connelly because the bird would alight on the deck and sashay into the house through any open door. The original One-eyed Connelly was a famous gate crasher. A former bantam weight boxer from Boston, Connelly began crashing events in the early 20th century, sometimes pretending to be a deputy sheriff.  Read that character’s story in the 1953 Milwaukee Journal.