Six Degrees of High Pockets
Every kid needs a wonderful grandparent, and mine was named John. My Mama called him Daddy, lots of people called him Mr. Craft, and when his friends were trying to raise him on a C.B. radio, they called him High Pockets. For me, he was Papaw. He was a tall man, probably 6’3” with no shoes on, which explains the C.B. handle. On the way back from World War II, he stopped in St. Louis, met a beautiful big city girl in a U.S.O. club, and a few weeks later got on a train home with her, headed for a rural little spot in South Mississippi. He married her when they got there, and eventually he settled his wife and their four young children in a lush river bottom, a couple hundred yards from the shady banks of the Bouie River and about 60 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. My Mama, his first born, was in her early twenties and working at the Sea Bee base in Biloxi when she met my Daddy. When they found out their first baby (me) would arrive in the spring of 1971, they bought a house across t