A Case For Lazy Fair Lawn Care A question for you male readers: Have you ever noticed how you can make other guys start whistling?es pecially in some place like a men's room?just by whistling yourself? You know what I mean. You wan der in and things arc real quiet. Some guys are finishing up, wash ing and drying their hands or comb ing their hair. Others arc doing their business. And the rest are jockeying for a stall position. But nobody's talking. Not a word. So you unconsciously start whistling a little tunc, just to case the tension. Ninety-nine times out of a hun dred, if there arc at least three guys who don't know each other, some body else will start whistling. Guar anteed. Saturday morning, I noticed that the same thing happens whenever anyone on the block starts cutting the grass. At 9:30 a.m., when I dragged out the mower, everything was dead still. Just a few birds chirping. A car door slamming down the road. Some kids yelling in the distance. When my cars recovered after shutting down the cursed ratUc trap, I noticed that at least a half-dozen other lawn mowers were sputtering away doing laps around lawns all over the neighborhood. Maybe it's some kind of sublimi nal message reception learned in childhood. The little putt-putt-putt of a far-off Briggs and Stratton re minding a husband that the chores must be done before he goes out to play. Or maybe its the spouse that picks up the sound and does the re minding. In some neighborhoods, where a well-manicured lawn is seen as evi dence of a family's good breeding, the sound of another man's mower hard at work is like a call to battle. These homeowners can be made to feel guilty at the mere suggestion that the Joneses arc not being kept up with. I myself cannot. Isn't that why they invented Astro-Turf? So we could be free of this self-imposed bondage to the un attainable ideal of a weed-free lawn? So yard maintenance would be re duced to an annual oncc-over with an industrial carpct cleancr? A closcly-croppcd lawn is an in sult to nature. Like shaving the hair off your Labrador retriever. Or snip ping all those nasty blossoms off a bouquet of roses. Or serving your guests boiled corn cobs with the ker nels scraped off. If it were up to me, tall grass would be a sign of good citizenship. An indication that the owner is ac tively promoting nature's niuogen cycle and cultivating as many oxy gen-producing photosynthctic cells as can possibly be crammed onto one 5,000-square-foot lot. You are probably wondering how I attained this higher plane of envi ronmentally aware landscaping con sciousness. I must say, without a doubt, that I owe it all to the Fred Astairc of laissez faire lawn care: my dad. Moving from one new subdivi sion to another across the suburban Northeast (courtesy of the DuPont Company), Dad was confronted with a debilitating scries of new home landscaping challenges. It seemed that each of our new homes was built on land from which the de veloper had scraped off (and proba bly sold) every morsel of arable top soil, leaving a barren moonscape of rock-hard clay. With sod and seed, fertilizer and lime, spreader and sprinkler, he would do his best to make the desert bloom with bluegrass and shrubbery. Sometimes the magic worked and sometimes it didn't Most times, we were long gone before his efforts bore visible fruit. So when we moved to yet another new housing development in New Jersey and found another 1.5-acre "lawn" of red clay and shale. Dad's first impulse was to "pave it and paini it green." His second impulse was to con duct a controlled bum after the so called "grass seed" planted by the (vanished) developer sprouted into a representative sample of every unde sirable weed species known to horti culture. During his initial denial phase, before coming to grips with the full range of the developer's crimes, my dad theorized that neighborhood delinquents had filled the grass-seed spreader with gathered weed seeds. This idea was abandoned once the golden field of dandelion blossoms bore colorful witness that this was far beyond the scope of youthful mischief. With no hope of creating a real lawn out of the mess, by Dad made a fantastic discovery. He found that?to all but the overly nosy ob server?a closely cropped field of weeds looks just like closely cropped grass. Close enough, any way. So he bought a lawn tractor, as signed me the task of operating it, and spent his weekends on the golf course. As a side benefit, the tractor provided me with a summer job. Instead of pestering Dad for an al lowance, I made a small fortune feeding and fertilizing and cuuing all those fussy neighbor yards. As my first motorized vehicle, the tractor also gave me valuable train ing that would serve me well as a fu ture automobile driver. I learned how to do power slides and wheel stands, how to speed-shift a manual transmission and how to repair mi nor scratches and dents in a vehicle so Mom and Dad never found out that I "borrowed" it. Dad's second yard maintenance revelation was even more signifi cant. After about 20 years of doing absolutely nothing to the lawn ex cept cuuing it, the grass somehow choked out the weeds. Today his lawn looks just as good?even up close?as the yards of all those neighbors who spent thousands of dollars on fertilizer and weed killers. Now if 1 can just convince Lynn of how much belter our lawn would look if we let the grass go to seed for the summer... PHOTO BY BILL FAVft THIS PROUD ROBIN keeps an eye out for any intruder which may threaten her nest. Birds On The Nest BY BILL FAVER Grackles and orioles make nests more basket-like as This is the time of year when we are likely to find do some of the warblers. nesting birds in almost any shrub, vine, or tree in our There is always the question of what to do when we yard. find a baby bird out of the nest. The purists in environ With the loss of many nesting areas, birds are will- mental circles say we should leave them alone, that ing to come to sites where they this is the way of nature. Others feel we should put can find some shelter and where them back in the nest if we can do so without causing they are not likely to be disturbed, stress to the adult birds, who may abandon them. B^iyaRL^Slin,8 ^'VC a, My suggestion is to use common sense and return &ssrzrjsrisz * ?**rr^yor:gciio^M , .. , . . ' not, put it in a brushy vine or high enough to give it and someumes birds will return to "^ugii and see if the adult bird can coax it the same areas year after year if ^ ^ they are not harmed. Most mockingbirds, robins, car- It is best to watch the bird on the nest with binocu dinals, and similar species prefer lars, for any disturbance when nesting and egg-laying faver to make a shallow to deep cup begins may cause the birds to abandon the nest and go nest along a limb or in the fork of a branch. Wrens, elsewhere. Once the birds have hatched and the feed bluebirds, chickadees, and crested flycatchers prefer a ing begins, we can get closer, but we still should never, nest box or an abandoned hole in a tree or fence post, never touch the young birds or the nest. Nuthatches also prefer a hole in a dead tree which they Let's let the birds do their thing, and we can take joy will fashion themselves if given the opportunity. Most in watching them and in contributing to their continu of the woodpeckers do the same. ing presence with us in our own backyards. Loyol Nascor Fan Rallies To Defend His Sport From 'Mr. Carlson' MORE LETTERS To the editor: an avid fan of Formula 1 Grand Prix My letter is in response to Eric racing. I too like to watch Grand Carlson's column about Nascar be- Prix racing, but can't for the world ing a boring sport to watch. see why anyone with any kind of To begin with, any sport?or, for right mind would like to race a ma that matter, any subject including chine (as Mr. Carlson likes to call it) being a professional journalist?can that is stripped of everything except be boring when a person docs not four open wheels, a high-revving en understand what they are writing gine and (listen to this one) a driver about. I feel Mr. Carlson does not lying on his back about two inches fully understand Nascar after read- off the pavement. ing his article. I wonder how Rusty Wallace I'll agree that it gets very hot and would have looked had he been dri that there are 50,000 hot, sweaty ving this machine in the Daytona people, but we Nascar fans love it. 500 and flipped it end over end nine Mr. Carlson stales that there are a or ten times. I'll bet my entire bunch of cars painted up like laun- Nascar collector card set that he'd dry detergent boxes running around have more than a little scratch on his in circles, but I watch Nascar and chin. Or let's take this machine to follow it every day of my life in one the godforsaken (as Mr. Carlson way or another, and 1 only see one called it) Talladega Speedway and out of 42 cars that races weekly with let Rusty flip it 15 times and see if laundry detergent advertising paint- he comes out with only a hurt wrist ed on it. Mr. Carlson stales that those Mr. Carlson slates thai he grew up Nascar lumbering billboards couldn't keep a Formula 1 car in sight for a single lap of Grand Prix racing. I'll agree with this, but what could keep up with a one-hundrcd plus-thousand-dollar engine with a turbocharger turning out four or five times more horsepower than a Nascar engine? But let's take this same Formula 1 Grand Prix machine to Bristol, Tenn., on the high-banked half-mile oval and I'll bet the Nascar machine could lap the Grand Prix machine 400 times out of 500 laps of Nascar racing. Mr. Carlson states that Nascar folks (which should read fans) will be shocked to learn that Grand Prix races require a driver to turn left and to turn right. They have to use the brakes AND the accelerator, and they go up and down real hills. If he watched the Nascar Save-Mart 300 from Sonoma, Calif., on Sunday, I hope he changed his mind complete GUEST COLUMN Small World, Big World: We're Outdone At Our Own Doorstep BY KARL E. BRANDT The bus boy was a witty Frenchman from Granville, which is on the west side of Normandy on the St. Milo Gulf coast, where the Germans wasted their machine guns on me whilst I zig-zaggcd up to 12,000 before D Day in World War II. Of course, Normandy brings to mind Calvados, that ancient apple brandy and, as fortune had it, one dessert on the menu was apples with a Calvados sauce. Ummm, good! It's a small world sometimes. Another bus boy and the maitre'd were from Portugal; the canny and most efficient waiter from the Philippines, the chef and his nearest assistants represent ed Germany, Austria and the Philippines. Yes, there were 16 nationalities among the 300 highly motivated food preparers and service personnel on this floating ho tel who won, for the third straight year, the distinction of having the best food among cruise ships. But no Americans! The other 350 crew members contained only a sprin kling of Americans and 28 additional national origins. World War II got us into the habit of being a bit smug as well as foot sorc...a double meaning which made up the graffiti which appeared everywhere: "Kilroy was here." Then, there were the trips to the moon, our huge air craft industry, various technological firsts, the last of the "super powcrs"...you name it. We are smitten with self approval. But in this Big World, somehow, Italy and others built better cruise ships than the United States...Of course! Our shipyards were idle or building warships only. And now there are more than 80 modern cruise ships plying the seas and visiting United States ports to pick up a mostly American clientele and furnish us with the most enjoyable travels at affordable prices, but only a handful of American contributors. This is 50,000 maritime jobs our unemployed youth could be competing for and untold thousands of ship building and re-fiuing jobs. Given that practice im proves both the techniques and new developments, the foreign maritime industry is way ahead of what we could offer, only at a much higher cost. Of course, there are a multitude of open and hidden reasons why foreign businessmen, engineers, craftsmen and crewmen are doing what our own people cannot. Lower labor costs is an obvious consideration. And foreign crewmen are willing to work long hours, too. But it is our young people who arc the real losers, not those who serve at low pay. The right path to successful adulthood is a combination of learning how to give and to take. Our young people have learned to consider the take before they lcam to give. We ship them off to college at our present expense or their future earnings to repay student loans to learn, for instance, business management. I submit that a couple years as a bus boy, waiter, stew ardess), etc., on board cruise ships would have more ed ucational value. The capital and management problems cruise line ex ecutives have are staggering, and 1 don't have to enu merate them, when you consider the logistics and per sonnel problems involving 650 crew members, to orga nize or have constructed the vessels that will properly accommodate 1,200 passengers, arrange itineraries, ad vertising, booking, loading and unloading, etc. ...all the time with a contagious smile so customers will get what they paid for! Small world or big world, American can no longer af ford to be smug. Our foreign friends have outdone us at our own doorstep. (Karl Brandt, who recently returned from a cruise, lives in Shallotte.) ly and takes it back. In closing I would like to point out that when Mr. Carlson let a newspaper friend put a camera around his neck to get him into the pits at the World 600 (the longest Nascar race on the tour), he de served what he got. If he wants to watch a real race, he should try to get a newspaper friend to buy him a ticket to the grandstands at the World 600 and come sit with us and watch the race action where he can see the cars all the way around the racetrack, unlike Grand Prix racing, where they run a three-, four- or sometimes five-mile course through the streets of a city, and you might get to see the machines two or three seconds until the next lap. This, my friend, sounds?and is?boring to watch. I think this just might be the rea son why we no longer have the United States Grand Prix. One more thing before I let Mr. Carlson take it back. He states that tractor pulling is a sport developed by oversubsidized farmers with 5100,000 jet-engincd tractors trying to sec who can pull a heavily weighted sled the farthest through a mud field. For your information, these tractors pull a sled on a hard packcd red clay track. Next lime he should write about something he fully understands. Artie Duncan Holdcn Beach Thanks For After Prom, Stand Behind Young To the editor: Speaking as a parent of a student at West Brunswick High School, I want to thank each and every one who planned or donated even the smallest part of the wonderful After Prom event. It was well-planned, or ganized to the letter and well thought-out. The students were the best. They were well-behaved, enthusiastic and could enjoy a time of good clean fun. We need to be proud of our young people of Brunswick County. They are our future. We need to stand behind those who can make the right choices. Nancy B. Wemyss Ocean Isle Beach Heroes Of Clean-Up To the editor Heroes in our time! The men of the VFW Post 8866 of Holdcn Beach, and the ladies' auxiliary, are proven heroes in our foreign wars, but are now meeting a new chal lenge?the war against litter on our highways. Since they adopted the highway starting at the Holden Beach cause way and ending at Lock wood Folly golf course, it has never looked cleaner. Through a maze of discard ed bottles, cans, trash and even mat tresses, the battle continues. With new artillery, the "Swat a Litterbug" program, the battle may be won. I say "three cheers" for the men and women of the VFW. I salute them! Fran Vogt Holden Beach Write Us The Beacon welcomes letters to the editor. All letters must be signed and include the writer's address and telephone number Only the author's name and town will be listed. Under no circumstances will anonymous letters be published. We reserve the right to edit libelous comments. Address letters to The Brunswick Beacon, F. O. Box 2558, Shallotte, N. C. 28459. <, n 7 D.ivs .1 W.-. k, liKSKKVATIONS I'ltKKKItliKI) iX(M> 2?9-2