He Has Turned Slap Over

Big Daddy has started to fidget in his grave.


I suppose the next thing we will see is the “hunk” undertakers will replace the picture of Jesus and Martin Luther King on the funeral fans.

What is this world coming to?

George Henry Goddard, called Big Daddy by his grandchildren, was born in 1883. His father actually started the funeral business in Reynolds about 17 years before Big Daddy was born.

In his last years Big Daddy would spend most of the morning reading the obituaries in the Macon Telegraph. He died sitting in his easy chair – that days obituary column in his lap.

I said if he had lived one more day he could have read his own.

But Big Daddy saw a lot in his life.

Rutherford Hayes was the President when he was born and Thomas Edison had invented the light bulb just four years earlier. When Big Daddy was eight years old, James Naismith invented the game of basketball. When he was 25 years old, the Ford Model T automobile appeared. The United States entered World War I when he was 44 years old.

He was 46 when the stock market crashed in 1929 and he saw about half of the banks in the United States fail.


Big Daddy was 51 when the “Lady in Red” betrayed gangster and folk hero John Dillinger resulting in him being gunned down outside a theater in Chicago.

And he was 55 when Orson Welles did his broadcast of the War of the Worlds on the radio causing widespread panic throughout the US with people thinking Martians were actually invading our land.

There was definitely Widespread Panic in the USA before the popular rock band by that name was formed.

Big Daddy was 58 when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor and was 64 years old when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball.

He was 71 years old when this grandson was born and 72 when Rosa Parks wouldn’t move to the back of the bus in Montgomery.

When John Kennedy was elected President, Big Daddy was 78 years old and he was 80 when he was assassinated in Dallas.

He had turned 86 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and was 91 when Nixon resigned the Presidency.

He was 94 when the peanut farmer from Georgia was elected President of the United States.

And he was 95 when he popped me in the groin with his walking cane in the middle of a funeral because I had my hands in my pockets.



I can only imagine what he would done if I had my shirt off.

Big Daddy did see a lot in his life.

But one thing he never did see was the Men of Mortuaries Calendar.

I take it back. Big Daddy ain’t fidgeting in his grave.

He has turned slap over.