Art Fettig's Blog

I’m sitting here working on a talk for the North Carolina Purple Heart Assn. Annual Meeting Banquet and I have fifteen minutes following the Keynoter. I’ve done many hundreds of banquet presentations and twice now in the past I have looked out on the audience and spotted a member who was wearing a Congressional Medal of Honor.  One was Matt Urban in Michigan and the other was Walter (Joe) Marm,Jr. here in North Carolina. In combat both men laid their lives on the line again and again.They were heroes of the highest order. Later when I met them I stood in awe. Both were humble men.And Saturday night I will look out on this group of Purple Heart recipients and I will stand in awe of all those who served our nation with courage and honor. We will laugh together and perhaps shed a tear or two for our fallen comrades and in our hearts we will all hold a prayer for a better America.

...I play the role of Almost Andy, an old coot who looks very much like Andy Griffith...

I suspect that by now, most of our readers know that I play the role of Almost Andy, an old coot who looks very much like Andy Griffith and shows up at some Mayberry events wearing a seersucker jacket possibly looking enough like Matlock to satisfy most. Occasionally I do some stand up comedy on the funny situations I encounter being mistaken for Andy Griffith. On more structured occasions I do a program titled An Evening With Almost Andy.  I started doing this shortly after my 80th birthday and it has been a hoot. After forty years as a professional “motivational humorist”, mostly specializing in corporate safety and doing from sixty to ninety minutes presentations it comes as sort of a shock to hear that I have a minute and a half on a program but with so many folks onstage it just makes good sense. The fact that I had spent almost two days rubbing elbows and posing for photos with most of this audience made it all the more understandable. What I did say came from my heart and it covered the fact that I felt truly blessed to be with them and that I felt honored to be with so many folks that walked the talk. I got to shake hands with so many old folks and with special children and with folks of all ages from all walks of life who’s mutual interest was watching The Andy Griffith Show. We had two parades and I got to ride up high in the back of a convertible with a beautiful queen next to me and the town mayor up front.  Barney and Gomer and Floyd and some of the others were walking and Charlene was in another convertible up front with Rodney Dillard, one of the Darlings on that show. Now I know that a lot of you would rather go to the beach or the mountains or the race track or such but for me and my lady, we had more fun than most folks our age have on a weekend and we truly feel  blessed.

Well, she went and upgraded me to a beautiful Ford convertible.

Most of what I do these days and most of what I find comes when I am trying accomplish and when I am looking for something else. Take this picture for instance. When I was a kid I always said I’d own a brand new convertible one day. I’d left behind my fairly new car with my sister Flo when I went into the army and told her to use it as her own and just return it when I got back. Well, she went and upgraded me to a beautiful Ford convertible. On my return from Korea, everywhere my buddy Earl and I went that evening folks bought us drinks and I had not driven for over eighteen months and neither had my buddy. Well, first I baptized the car with an accident and we pulled the fenders off the tires and he drove and within a half an hour he had totaled it out.

Like I always said, I had a brand new convertible one day. It really shakes me up every time I read about a returning G. I. who made it through a war alive only to get killed on our highways. The Photo? A bit of magic from my wife, Jean. We found a kit model of a 1953 Ford, photographed the box and then she took a photo of me in uniform and darned if she didn’t zip me behind the wheel. I recently had my 51st Anniversary of continued sobriety so I guess I am entitled to tell these war stories. Please do not drink and drive. The life you might be saving is mine.

...taken from Federal Government employees perforance evaluations.

If you’ve ever had an evaluation, remember, it could have been worse. The following are reported to be actual quotes taken from Federal Government employees performance evaluations.

1. “Since my last report, this employee has reached rock-bottom and has started to dig.”
2. “I would not allow this employee to breed.”
3. “This employee is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definite won’t be.”
4. “Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.”
5. “When she opens her mouth it seems that it is only to change feet.”

Sounds to me like a report on our national legislators.

... ride off into the horizon ...

Whenever I hear about some political person who is in hot water announce that he is resigning in order to spend more time with his or her family I sort of chuckle.  Makes me sort of wonder if the family would like to spend time with the newly unemployed. In the old cowboy movies the hero would just get on his faithful horse and ride off into the horizon but for many of us aging geezers life becomes a real challenge when we discover we just can’t do some of the things we used to do or hoped to do but didn’t have the time to do.  Too often I hear of someone who intends to retire to a lifetime of golf only to discover that when they do retire they can no longer hit the ball.  Or the would be pianist who finds that her hand cramps up when she plays for more than a few minutes.  There are dozens of ways that your body can let you down when it comes to the time when you finally have the time to spend on your dream. The secret is to be found in the lyric of a song I penned a few years ago.  ”Don’t wait too long to make your dreams come true.”

When is the last time that you rehearsed something important that you planned to say? Or maybe you are so talented that you can just wing your way through life. I’ve been rehearsing pages of lines that I will be saying in a theatre production late next month and I’m learning just what hard work really is. The only real job of memorizing in my early youth was one Thanksgiving when I learned this. “Five fat turkeys are we, we slept all night in a tree. When the cook came around, we couldn’t be found. And that’s why we’re here, you see.” I learned that in kindergarten and I used to recite that for any occasion. Thanksgiving. Christmas. A New Year’s party. I accepted all requests. In high school I learned “Four score and seven years ago, our father’s….” and some sixty years later when I visited Gettysburg I stood on the spot where President Lincoln stood and recalled those words and spoke them.

I rehearsed for a week after finishing The Christopher Leadership Course before I asked my boss for a raise and got it. Then I wrestled with those awesome words, “Will you marry me?” only to have to go through that all again nearly sixty years later. I am just sharing this with you so that in case you see me walking down the streets talking to myself and saying things like, “Barney, this is a solo microphone and it is so powerful it will magnify your voice a thousand times,” then you will know what is going on. I’m rehearsing.

When did you suspect that you might be jumping off a cliff without a parachute?

When asked what surprised him most about humanity, the Dalai Lama answered, “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

When is the last time you tried something really new? When did you suspect that you might be jumping off a cliff without a parachute? Every now and then when I try something new, when I find myself in front of a really different audience daring to try something I have never dared before I have a moment of doubt just before I begin. There is a little choking in my throat and a thought might dart through my mind, “Why are you doing this? Why didn’t you just stay back there in your comfort zone?” And later, after the presentation is over and whether I won or lost I have a feeling of accomplishment. OK, so most of the time I feel that thrill of doing something new and it worked out but even when things go wrong I feel good that I tried it and that I survived and I try hard to stand back and learn as much as I might from the experience.

I keep remembering something I heard a great speaker named Larry Wilson once said about hell. He said he believe that hell would be somewhere that you would be shown all that you might have done with your talents and your opportunities and then put somewhere that you could do nothing about it.

We all have talents, we all have opportunities but do we have the spunk, the courage to try something new?

I’m working on it.

...later the sun burst through...

My wife, Jean, and I were driving back to our home in the woods and the sky was full of clouds and then a silver lining appeared in the sky and just a few seconds later the sun burst through and it was one of the prettiest skies you could ever see.

Then perhaps a dozen golden and silver linings appeared and it brightened my whole spirit.

Jerome Kern captured this experience with his wonderful song titled Look For The Silver Lining and here is the lyric.

Look for the silver lining
When e’er a cloud appears in the blue.
Remember somewhere, the sun is shining
And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you.

A heart, full of joy and gladness
Will always banish sadness and strife
So always look for the silver lining
And try to find the sunny side of life.

Will you join me in 2012 in looking for the goodness in this wonderful world?

...pretty soon a whole mess of people were singing...

I first met Sue in Atlanta when I worked with her husband, Richard, while I was doing some speeches for Alabama Power there. Sue had grown up in a small Georgia town where she went to school barefoot and that schoolhouse had a dirt floor. She was a real Southern Woman, a successful one too.

I just want to share with you one of the stories about a really cool thing that Sue did that really impressed me. I might tell you a better one later if you like this one. It seems that one late afternoon Sue was on one of those planes that land at Atlanta and just sits there out on the strip waiting for a place to dock. Here was a full plane and the passengers were breathing easy after a smooth landing and anxious to dock so they might deplane.. Instead they had to just sit there, five minutes, ten minutes. It already seemed like an hour but when an hour had passed the passengers had not already used up all of their patience but they had run out of techniques they had learned in their anger control classes. The flight attendants had done everything they knew to pacify the angry passengers and it seemed like a near riot was fast approaching.

An hour and ten, an hour and twenty, I heard it was about at an hour and a half that Sue just popped up from her seat and standing in the aisle, she called out bravely, “I think it is time for a song. How many of you will join me in singing Amazing Grace? And they began to sing. First just a few but it sort of caught on and pretty soon a whole mess of people were singing, one chorus, two, three, they did a full four choruses of Amazing Grace with the key change and, fortunately, shortly after that she sat down and the plane pulled up to an open dock and the passengers were all allowed to deplane.

Now maybe this is something that could only happen in the Bible Belt but amazingly, one woman changed the attitude of a couple of hundred passengers and a whole lot of that tension was relieved just like that.

OK, sure she broke the rule about keeping seated but they had already violated that rule when some passengers started turning blue because they had to use the bathroom so badly.

I imagine she violated a number of passengers civil rights too if they didn’t subscribe to a belief that allowed the singing of Amazing Grace. If they turned in a complaint about this they no doubt turned in a complaint about a noise violation too because Sue can really belt it out when she gets inspired.

Sue is just that kind of person who, when she sees a problem tries to do something to make things better. Now I am sure that there were other negative forces at work on that plane. Perhaps some tort specialist was already busy passing business cards down the aisle trying to stir up a class action lawsuit. I suppose there was some talk of a revolt combined with an attack on the door so escape might be possible.

But Sue, being a sweet, kindly Christian woman just thought of what might take her mind off the troubling situation and she did her thing.

I wonder how many situations you have been in personally where a person like Sue with a little gumption and a creative mind might have saved situation or improved a bad condition?

Now I have been telling that story for perhaps twenty years and quite often folks ask me what the key change is I mentioned in the above story. I have tried to explain it in my poor way because I cannot really carry a tune. Well, the other day a friend of mine sent me a Website to check out and if you like that song Amazing Grace you will probably love this as much as I do. It tells a lot about the song but as a bonus, at the very end of this demonstration you will hear that key change in all of its glory. Check it out, if you like. http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=1312