Police (long o, accent on the first syllable)

I have a serious blog topic I hope to deal with soon, but today was so gorgeous, I had to come up with something pleasant. After all, we spent several hours on the beautiful Hunting Island beach today, a wide strand of sand, winding off in both directions, lined by palmettos. Riding home from the beach, we passed restaurants with names like "Weezie's Seafood," "The Crab Shack," and "Gullah Grub." We also passed a bunch of deputy sheriff's cars lying in wait in hopes of laying a speeding ticket on some scofflaw. I thought about the police and the wonderful way some people talk around here, and an idea for a blog came to me. And though the idea has nothing to do with Hunting Island beach or South Carolina, for that matter, it does deal with the way different people talk around this country. It deals with something else, too--little devices used to trigger explosions called blasting caps!

At this point, my blog takes specific aim at people who grew up in the 50's and watched TV in the fifties. Other people, unless they're involved in the construction or destruction industries, may never have heard of a blasting cap. I have, because 50's television was peppered with public service announcements warning kids not to pick up or play with blasting caps, that they might find laying around construction sites. There were so many ads, in fact, that I soon believed there were misplaced blasting caps everywhere, just waiting to blow one of my feet off. Or worse, blind me. I and all my friends tiptoed carefully around any construction site we happened to be frequenting to "borrow" scrap wood to build our various forts with. These little things, which no one had ever seen, really terrified us. It was the Willie Mays' blasting cap commercial that really made us believe.

Willie, after all, was one of our heroes. He spoke in a wonderful Southern accent and pronounced police as "poe-lease" with the accent on the first syllable. I'll always remember Willie's warning, "If you see a blasting cap, do not touch it! Call a poe-lease o' fireman. Do not touch it. You may loose your hands o' eyes!" Willy's warning is a delightful memory which now makes me smile. Back then it scared the heck out of me.