I met this man on July 1 on the corner of Northside and Martin Luther King Jr. drives. This is what he said.
“In 1976 I was sitting at the house one Saturday morning practicing over some songs and jokes, and I opened up my mouth and said, ‘Lord, if I deliver the word that you give me through that dummy there, man might take heed — because he don’t believe.’ And I know it is a true statement, but I thought, ‘Oh yeah I will do that later in life.’
“But 15 minutes after that, I got up and went out to the back door of the house. I had a lock on the garage gate, but I had lost the key. So I got a hatchet out of the garage and started beating down on the lock trying to knock it off the gate. That hatchet came off of that lock with my hand wrapped around that handle. I did not have no control over my hand at all. That hatchet came right off the handle towards my heart as fast as lightning and stopped within one inch of my heart and touched me softly. When that happened to me, I went down on my knees and said, ‘Oh my Lord, my God,’ and I remained there for five or six minutes. And then I got up and I looked at that hatchet laying on the ground and three things went through my mind.
“The first thing was, ‘Hey fool, this is the master.’ The second thing that went through my mind was, ‘If [God] wanted to take your life, [He] could have done it right there.’ The third thing was, ‘What you said in your house about delivering the word that I give you through that dummy, you get on it and don’t waste no more time.’
“God knows for a fact that the people of this nation have been told all of their life about Jesus, but 80 percent have denied his word and continue to live in sin. But his word has never been delivered through a dummy, so I am out here delivering the word of God through a dummy. I am out here every day. My dummy’s name is Sweet Pea Johnson. I have been doing this for 32 years. I am out here warning people about the coming of Jesus through a dummy.”
(Photo and interview by Joeff Davis)
This car was parked on Alta Ave. NE when a tree fell on it at 5:45 p.m. on Sept. 26. The car was Billy Eiselstein’s. All week Billy had purposely parked his car in the front of his house because two big pecan trees in the back of his house had been staining his car with falling pecans. “I been parking in the front of my house all week to avoid pecan stains,” he said. “I didn’t know how bad it was ’til they removed the tree.”
Eddie Ray celebrates the reopening of the 14th Street bridge by donning a cape and being one of the first to go across the new and improved connector. The road opened for car traffic Sept. 3.
