Mark Twain once said, "Always tell the truth, that way you don't have to remember anything."
He also said, "never let the facts get in the way of a good story."
Still, on another occasion, he wrote, "the truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie."
Then again, he said, "only children and fools tell the truth."
Finally, Hannibal, Missouri's favorite son said, "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
In the famous NBC television drama "Dragnet", at the beginning, the announcer says, "the story you are about to hear is true........"
The subject of today's blog is me. So, in a sense, it is auto biographical, and as hard as it may be for some of you to believe, it is also true. (I called my mother to have her verify. She was an eyewitness to these events and confirmed their authenticity, so they must be true. Also, my mother doesn't lie).
I was born in the spring of 1957 in Webster Parish, Louisiana. Dad was working for International Paper at the time, and we lived in a small town in Arkansas on the Arkansas-Louisiana border. A few months later we moved to Monticello, Arkansas, as Dad had decided to enroll at Arkansas A&M (now UA-Monticello).
We were the happy little family in Monticello. Mom worked in the A&M Student Center while dad attended classes. At the time, Dad was 22, Mom was 21.
By the following spring, little Dalton (that's me) still wasn't walking. Still crawling on his belly like a reptile, but no walking. According to my mother, around my birthday in 1958, I started walking! Well, sort of. What I had accomplished was pulling myself up by one of the many chairs in the Student Center and pushing it all around the snack area where Mom worked.
Evidently my pushing chairs around was a popular spectator sport among the A&M students, as according to my mother (I swear I am not making this up), the students would cheer when I would bring a chair to them or get a chair in its spot at a table. I have been told by the person who contributed 50% of my DNA, the students would reward me by giving me food. French fries, or popcorn, a bite of toast, just whatever was handy. Thus started a lifetime of eating between meals.
Still, the folks were somewhat concerned. I mean, I was a year old, and still not walking by myself. I was only walking upright when pushing a chair and given food as a reward. Looking back, you could say I was a pretty well-trained monkey.
That all changed a month or two later. My Grandpa Sullivan, my dad's dad, lived in Beaumont, Texas, about 350 miles southwest of Monticello. Once school was out in the spring, mom and dad headed to Texas with their year-old monkey in tow. Dad had three younger siblings, two half-sisters and a half-brother. They were all happy to see the next generation of Sullivans come down for a few weeks.
After we had been there a few days, it may have been the weekend, I don't know, calendars didn't mean anything to me back then, the decision was made to head to the beach for a day or sun, surf, sand, siesta and seafood. Sounds like fun doesn't it.
Little did Mom or Dad know, or Grandpa, or Aunt Rema, Aunt Nina or Uncle Pat, that little Dalton Reese was about to walk on water. Well, not really, but it was monumental. Sort of.
As you know from your eighth-grade geography, Beaumont sits in southeast Texas, about 60 miles east-northeast of Houston, and north of Port Arthur, maybe 25 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The Sullivan family arrived at the beach, and here is where we have the climax of the story.
To refresh, remember I have not walked on my own yet, even though I was 14 months old. I had only pushed chairs around the Arkansas A&M campus for entertainment.
According to my mother, as we got to where the warm, yea verily, the hot waters of the Gulf were in sight, I did not start to walk, I ran toward the Gulf. According to Mom, she and Dad looked at each other in disbelief, and one of them said something along the lines of, "that little stinker." So my first unaided steps were actually running, not walking to the Gulf of Mexico.
Thus began a life-long love affair with the beach and water. It is my happy place and evidently has been since I was 14 months old. I should probably add as I type this on this Thursday evening in August 2025, some 67 years after the described events, I am sitting on the fifth floor of a condo at Panama City Beach, Florida. That very same Gulf of Mexico is in sight. Well if it were still daylight, it would be, but it is approaching 11 p.m., so it's dark and I can only point in the general direction and tell you the Gulf is "over there."
I turned 68 earlier this year, and I have been hearing this story my whole life. So it must be true. At least my mother says it is.
Have a great rest of the week. Be kind to each other. See you on the flip-side.
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