Christmas at Toad Hall

A Toad Hall Christmas  These photos were taken one Christmas at Toad Hall, my home and a place where Karl spent a lot of time when in Knoxville. And, at first to my great delight and, later, to my dismay, where he met the beauteous and winsome Barbara Mott. Toad Hall gets a mention in the Kane novel Bloodstone. These photos were taken with the early, cheap consumer grade Polaroid and are slowly fading away; I’ll touch up the scans and add some information about the photos before next Christmas.

I’ll explain more fully, for example, why my friends all chipped in and bought me a Christmas coffin (there was a silver device on the outside of the lid that read “Our Darling”). The coffin was the centerpiece of our celebration that year, the other Toad Hall presents arrayed within and around it. The Peace T-Shirt was a souvenir I brought back for Barbara, a souvenir of the Atlanta Pops Festival (which wasn’t in Atlanta), where Jimmy Hendrix had given his last public American performance and where I boasted the only burr haircut among 750,000 hippies. Wagner is shown opening one of my presents to him, a Mr. Peanut bank, a reference to Zap comics. Grant Riddle, middle left, is overwhelmed upon opening his present, an antique set of brass knuckles, Barbara, perhaps slightly in her cups, is delighting in her presents of coal and switches, I am genuinely moved by Karl’s present of the first two Little Lulu comics and two Dell four-color issues of Little Lulu that preceded number one. In the final photo, Karl is nodding off with his head cradled on my coffin, holding a word balloon expressing his Christmas sentiments, while Froggy the Gremlin, to the left, offers his usual greeting. Barbara’s friend Marilyn Childress expresses a borrowed fondness for The Cinnamon Bear (about which Christmas story you may read further in the ”Influences” section). To the right Ken James, a great believer in the Second Amendment and keeper of the Toad Hall ordnance, cuddles the adorable Precious, an English bulldog I adopted from the local pound even thought they warned me she wouldn’t live a week (it was ten years). Precious appears in one of Wagner’s last short stories, “Small Lessons in Gardening.”

Barbara  What man could resist that smile? A woman well worth fighting over.