Jay's favorite vocation and avocation is photography. Photos gratia artis. He started young, encouraged by his father who at family events proudly took the current-model Kodak box camera off its high shelf in the closet. The old man set everybody blinking with the flash from huge bulbs, even in outdoor sunlight, and after weeks of waiting gleefully showed off curly edged glossy prints, square and sharp, many of them color. Yet, Jay's family album contains very little that survived the internal combustion of his dysfunctional family, so most of what's extant is stuff Jay shot in recent times.

Photographically, Jay started by recording his grandmother's flower beds with his father's Kodak. When the prints came back, an interminable wait later, the flowers were all black and white. Not beautiful, hand printed black and white, but bleached out "drugstore" prints - which is of course what they were.

Jay gave up in despair, unaware that changing the film would have brought color prints. Several years later, Jay received a new Polaroid Land Camera - freshly invented - with a kit of accessories. It was a gift from his father. The camera required some finagling with exposures, but Jay managed to figure out the EV system and went about recording absolutely everything for posterity - the cat, the house, and any relatives who'd put up with the hassle. None of these great images survives, so posterity, the Smithsonian (and the dumpster) are out of luck. After the new wore off, and the cute little Wink Light died for the second time and couldn't be repaired, Jay moved on to other enthusiasms, not to say obsessions, and parked the Polaroid.

Years passed, as years are wont to do. While at the university of South Carolina in Aiken, studying journalism, Jay snagged part time employment as a newspaper correspondent. His Sainted Grandmother bought him a 35mm camera, and a new interest was re-born. Again with the black and white. Only this time the prints got individualized attention from the newspaper's photo lab and even appeared in print.

In addition to Miss Bobo, Jay's teacher Hall of Fame (He also has a Teachers' Hall of Infamy, but is sparing you that for now) includes the late William T. Slaughter. An accomplished organist respected for his technically superb and musically inspired renditions of Bach fugues, Mr. Slaughter taught band instruments in all six (!) grades at Aiken Junior and High schools. He was a one-person staff - no assistant teachers back then - ably assisted at the High School by a student staff that included (ta-da!) Jay.

Mr. Slaughter taught all the instruments. Reeds, flutes, percussion and brass. Glockenspiel and timpani, oboe, clarinet and saxophone. French horn and trombone. Maybe he knew and played stringed instruments, too, but he didn't teach them, referring interested students to teachers in nearby Augusta, Georgia.

He gave private lessons in a back room of his house in downtown Aiken, and Jay, who stuck with band from Seventh to Twelfth grades, was one of his students, a half-decent one in his later years. Jay played cornet, the "symphonic" version of the trumpet. At the outset of band class in the Seventh Grade, Mr. Slaughter examined the facial structure of each new student in turn and recommended an instrument that suited them. He probably skewed the choices to what instrumentation the high school band would need three years into the future, but he never let on. Jay's choices were cornet or French horn, the latter of which, Mr. Slaughter warned, was quite difficult to play.

Easy choice, really. Jay took the path of least resistance, with blessings from his father, who disliked music in general except for the military bugle call "Taps." After an impressively inauspicious start, Jay caught on to getting a sound out of the instrument, moved up to shaky scales and the occasional arpeggio, and kept at it, even practicing occasionally as whim and necessity dictated. When Mr. Slaughter recommended private lessons, Jay's parents footed the bill, and Jay's father even sprung for a silver Conn Connstellation cornet, the stuff of dreams for a cornetist then and now. He'd already bought a baby grand piano that took up much of the livingroom.

Jay's hero list took on new musical entries. Harry James, of course, because he was still the rage in the early Sixties. And Bourbon Streeter Al Hirt, who had popular tunes in the Top Forty of the day. Good ones.

Jay's love affair with music started even earlier, as his Sainted Mother insisted he have piano lessons. She so wanted to be able to play the piano herself, but didn't take lessons. Instead, she dutifully pursued a mailorder self-study course in which the middle piano keys were numbered on a cardboard overlay. The course ignored basics and moved right into songs. Eventually, she learned to play her favorite piece, "The Merry Widow Waltz," quite well, but after that she stopped studying.

On the other hand, Jay flopped at piano. He learned to read music and count rhythms, but never got the knack of reading both treble and bass clef lines at the same time. When he figured out that he could improvise the music by reading only the treble clef, that was the end of piano studies. After exhausting only two piano teachers, the first being one of his cousins, he got stuck on "Flow Gently Sweet Afton," and gave up, turning his attention to the cornet, which only entailed one clef at a time. He took up piano many years later and learned to play a few of his favorite classical pieces - long after giving up all hopes of professional musicianship.

Jay played first chair cornet in the Aiken High School Bands and helped organize the Pep Band at the University of South Carolinia (slash) Aiken. That was pretty much the end of his career, however - although at the urging of a colleague, an accordion player at the newspaper where he worked, he played hymns and carols with the Salvation Army Band on Main Street a few times. Decades later (see the picture and don't laugh at the hot pink hat), Jay again had delusions of musical adequacy and relearned the cornet, but that episode was cut woefully short by health and other troubles.

Jay’s far from a literary scholar, or even a learned one, but he got it honest. He’s not from a literary family, really, and certainly not from a family of journalists, though he’s always loved newspapers and periodicals, as well as books. Jay’s father, orphaned at nine or so, didn’t make it past Rochester’s Fifth Grade. Jay’s Sainted Mother was educated in South Carolina, as was Jay, which says a whole lot right there without dwelling too much on the nitty gritty of the matter. She trudged miles from her parents’ farm to Windsor, South Carolina, when school was only eleven grades. She graduated - the first in her family to hold a high school diploma - and packed off to Columbia, the state’s capital, to attend secretarial school.

Throughout Jay’s childhood, if you could call it that, the household contained maybe two dozen books, all bibles, biblical

storybooks, and other trappings of Southern Baptistness. A relative had handed down a ten-volume set of baby raising books, not one of which, on Jay’s meticulous inspection when such matters became of interest, contained any reference to how babies were occasioned in the first place.

Along about Elementary School time, Jay’s parents wisely sprung for a set of World Book Encyclopedia when the salesman came to call. When Jay became interested in non-biblical literature along about Junior High School, they subscribed to Life, Look, the Reader’s Digest Books and the Book-of-the-month club. Nice as they were, none of those volumes contained...  Well, you know.

Jay discovered fiction in junior high school. They call that “middle school” now, not necessarily complimentarily. He read voraciously, though sporadically, establishing a tradition of reading absolutely everything by a given author and then moving on to someone else. Among Jay’s favorites were Arthur Conan Doyle, Earle Stanley Gardner, and Agatha Christie (sensing a theme here?). Though Aiken had a decent library, Jay always preferred to buy books, and keep them for later reference after devouring them. Enough with the third person. Just let Jay tell it.

Actually, I was never entirely comfortable in libraries, with all the shushing and the necessity of treading lightly on squeaky floors so as not to incur frowns from imperious librarians. The real problem was, however, that once I returned the books I didn’t have them anymore, in case I wanted to reread some passage I’d enjoyed. Oh, and that other problem: the librarians would know what I was interested in, and reading, and not necessarily approve, and potentially cause a stink if they didn’t. Not so with store clerks, who were much younger and didn’t look at anything but the cover price to ring up the sale.

My collection grew, and I printed a bunch of Ex Libris plates (on my own letterpress printing press, a story for later chapters) to distinguish treasured volumes. I accumulated books for decades, in spite of disasters that wiped out my collection several times. Although I again have lots of books, with Internet searching at my fingertips I rarely need to look up anything on actual paper. But I like having them.