By Jim Dickson
I was looking through an old shoe box of photographs that I had accumulated over the years and ran across a picture of myself and Lash La Rue. I really had not thought of him for a long time, but with seeing that picture years of boyhood memories came flooding back.
His real name was not Lash at all. His real name was Bobby Jones, which doesn’t sound strange, which is probably why Bobby always wanted to be called Lash.
The name came about when we were in the fifth grade and would ride our bikes down town to the Saturday matinee at the Lyceum theater. For the princely sum of 10 cents, the Lyceum featured two western movies, a weekly serial, and two cartoons.
On that day, one of the westerns stared a cowboy hero whose name was Lash La Rue. Lash dressed in black from head to toe. He even had a black cowboy hat, which was very unusual for a good guy. It went against type – good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black.
Not only did Lash have a set of six guns in fancy holsters, but he carried a long black bullwhip, and he would use the whip to lash guns, knives and other assorted weapons out of the hands of bad guys and then wrap the whip around their legs, pull them down, subdue them, and haul them off to jail to face long over due justice.
From that day on, Bobby was hooked. He made the discussion then and there that from now on he would be called Lash La Rue. As you might imagine, his parents, most school officials and the few (more or less) normal people who lived in our town were not fast to go along with the name change, but Lash was not to be dissuaded by mere adults.
As a part of his persona Lash liked to tell people that he and his parents came west in a covered wagon fighting Indians and outlaws all the way. In that Lash moved to our little town when we were in the third grade, I am pretty sure that story was somewhat exaggerated, because by 1951 almost no one came west in a covered wagons, all the Indians that I knew were pretty nice people, who to the best of my knowledge had never attacked a wagon of any kind. And if we had any outlaws, I had never seen them.
Lash never did get an all black outfit and a set of fancy six shooters. He did make himself a long black whip out of an old garden hose and a piece of old broom as a handle. He became most proficient with it, to the point that any kid, dog, or cat that came into his range was fair game.
That worked pretty well until he tried it on a kid named Smirk Goodfellow. Smirk was the local bully and all-around tough guy who all the kids avoided if possible. He and Bobby (now Lash) had a history of problems with each other, and Bobby (now Lash) had always come out on the short end of the stick.
Now that he was Lash things were going to change. I am sad to report it didn’t work out the way we all pictured it. Lash lashed, Smirk grabbed the hose, wrapped it around Lash, hit him over the head with the broom stick handle a couple of times and told him that if he ever saw him with the whip again he would really be sorry.
A sadder-but-wiser Lash disassembled the whip, put the hose back in his dad’s garage and it was never seen again. So ended the short career of the new Lash La Rue, but the name stuck, and except for a few hard-headed adults.
Lash was my best buddy, and we came to be known as the two foremost rocket builders, explosive experts and distillers of fine spirits in our little town. It was a reputation that was honestly earned over the years, not that his or my parents where particularly pleased about any of it.
Sadly we all have to grow up and become responsible adults who don’t have cool nicknames or terrorize small towns, but it was fun while it lasted. I am not sure what ever happened to Lash. The last I knew he went back east to law school, changed his name to Robert, married a girl who went to Wellesley, and God help him, I am afraid he became a Democrat.
A sad end to a fellow who once had such great potential.
Born, raised and educated in the Southwest, Jim Dickson served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in Vietnam before a 35-year business career. Retired to St. Helena Island, Dickson and his wife are fiscally conservative, socially moderate and active in Republican politics, though they may not always agree with Republicans. Having lived around the country and traveled around the world, Dickson believes that the United States truly is the land of opportunity.
