I had no brothers. I always wanted one but never had one. The nearest person to me, which I could call a brother, was Bub Murdock. He was my second cousin. We were the same age and in the same grade. There were several other boys with whom I had a close friendship. One of them was Eddie Stalcup.

Eddie was the nephew of Uncle Oscar’s wife. He was the only child of Jack and Wanda Stalcup. Wanda was Aunt Sue’s older sister. Although we were not kin to each other, we called the same people Aunt and Uncle.

Often, we would spend Sunday afternoons together. We would go either to my house or to his house after church and spend the afternoon playing and visiting. I enjoyed Eddie because he had a talent for drawing and always had a lot of toys and things to play with.

On one occasion, as I recall, we were at my house on Sunday afternoon. I was about twelve at the time. Eddie and I had played at dozens of things all afternoon long and were running out of things to do. We decided to take a walk down to the river and wade in the water by the bridge.

I don’t recall why or what possessed us to start doing it, but we became intrigued by the cars going over the bridge. For some reason, we decided to make some small mud balls and toss them up at the cars as they came over the bridge. At first we were aiming to see if we could hit the sides of the cars as they came across. We were getting successful at it and were having a delightful time. We were staying low in the weeds under the bridge so we wouldn’t be spotted by the people in the cars.

It occurred to us that we could stand under the south side of the bridge and not be seen at all while lobbing mud balls up at the cars. After a while we were getting pretty good at hitting nearly every car that came by. The mud balls weren't very large. They were small ones, about the size of a small chicken egg.

For some strange reason, we decided to see if we could fling mud balls high in the air above the bridge and time them such that they would hit the tops of the passing cars. It took some tricky coordination because we had to estimate the speed of the oncoming cars and estimate how high to throw the mud ball in order to coincide a direct hit. We decided to post one of us to watch for the car and give the signal when to hurl the mud ball.

We scored a direct hit on the very first car that came along. Well, nearly a direct hit. It was a direct hit to the windshield of the passing car. I have no idea why we didn’t foresee the possible consequences of such an action. I don’t remember which one of us gave the signal and which one propelled the mud ball, but the result of our of our little mud-clinging was instantaneous. Our direct hit stopped the first car dead in its tracks with a screeching halt.

The driver of that car was Rose Sharp. You would have to know Rose Sharp to know what Eddie and I were facing. Rose was always a very straight forward kind of person. Her style is to get right down to the nitty gritty things and she certainly did so with us on that afternoon. When we saw what had happened, realizing that we had shot one down, we began the process of fleeing. As we were running toward the house, Rose put her car in reverse and quickly backtracked. When she saw us running, she yelled at us and told us to come back. We were afraid not to... She forthwith gave us a large piece of her mind and told us that she was going to tell our parents what we had done. Furthermore, she told us we also had better tell them what we had done because she was going to check to see if we had told them what mischief we were into.

I don’t recall if Eddie ever told Jack and Wanda about the event, but I do remember being afraid not to tell Dad. I don’t remember what Dad did to me, but I’ll never forget scoring a direct hit on Rose Sharp’s car windshield with a Washita River mud ball. The pleasure of the direct hit was ever so brief. As I recall, I never flung another mud ball toward any car again in my life. Never...

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Afterthought: In later years, Rose and I would often reminisce about the incident. We would recount that incident and have a good laugh. There was never ill will between us over the incident. Our friendship through the years has been wonderful. Rose Sharp is one fine lady...