I Could Be Wrong
by RAY WOLBRECHT
Reminiscing back on a former Kyle resident, memories of Randolph Groos sprang to mind, along with his antics and humor.
Randolph Groos was about 90 when he passed on a few years ago. He was one of the Kyle old timers that made Kyle a great place to move into. Kyle had about 2000 people here and in my business I met people quickly – being the only dentist at the time. He was a carpenter and a really good one. I couldn’t figure out how to do the trimwork on a two-story house I was building in 1983. The solution? I got Mr Groos to do it.
Bald and bowlegged, he’d “sing” a little falsetto tune to himself as he worked. I asked him once what he was singing and he said it was just something he made up as he went along. In his early years it was said that he and his best friend, Orin Bales (of Hays High’s Bales Gym fame) used to be quite talented baseball players. By the time he was doing my stairs, his hip was deteriorating and moving quickly no longer was his style. Later the other hip began to give out so that he had to use a cane and he often stopped to rest or lean on something when moving about.
One day, he was in the dental chair and he always had a story for me. I never stopped him from telling it.
Mr. Groos told this story: one day he wanted to go fishing on the Blanco between Five Mile Dam and the railroad trestle. There’s a deep hole there known to hide good-sized catfish. He parked his old friend, the blue pickup with the pipe rack, on the side of the road and made about three trips from his truck to the river to get all the stuff he thought he needed to set down and fish. It was about 200 yards and steep from the truck to the river and a guy using a cane with two bad hips ... well it took a while.
Finally all set to go, he was comfortable in his folding chair, he picked up his rod and went to bait the hook. Forgot the bait. “Oh DANG!” he thought. “Now I gotta take all this stuff back up the hill and go to Kurt Lengefeld’s place and buy some bait, and then come back and start all over.” (Kurt was a Kyle soldier who translated the German-spoken testimonies at the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal ... Told you there were interesting old guys in Kyle.)
Tired from his previous exertions Mr. Groos sat there working on the energy to break camp. His mental state was not up to moving right then. He forced his mind to just go blank. Silence.
Hearing a rustle in the weeds just in front of him, he parted the weeds with his pole and found a snake working on swallowing a leopard frog. The snake was all wound up in the event and couldn’t respond to the old dude staring at him from an arm’s length. Randolph said that he grabbed the snake behind the head and ripped the frog out of his mouth (the snake’s mouth, not Randolph’s). The snake was mad and writhing all over Randolph’s arm. So he pulled from his back pocket his half pint of whisky and poured a little into the snake’s mouth. That calmed the snake and Randolph threw the snake back over his shoulder into the weeds, slipped the frog on his hook and made his cast right where the big cats gathered.
He knew then that he had a chance to say the trip wasn’t a total loss. Ten minutes went by with no discernable action and Randolph was thinking of many things, none of them included the snake. About that time while he was deep in thought and enjoying the setting, he felt a little tap tap on his right hiney cheek just below the beltline. He turned around and there was that snake again with another frog in his mouth.
Pause.
My mouth was agape trying to figure this out
Then he looked at me and smiled
I said, “Nawwww...”
His eyes twinkled like Santa Claus’s. Then he started laughing in his falsetto style, “Hee hee hee hee...” We both knew he got me good.
I really miss that old guy.
