I can remember hearing about Dick’s Hatband all my life. I bet you also remember hearing the phrase.
My Mama usually used the phrase in a financial sense, when she was describing a person as being stingy. I can remember two stories that she told throughout my childhood.
My Grandfather, Richard Gibson, owned and operated Gibson’s Pool in Pike County, Georgia. I was not born at the time, but Gibson’s Pool, (later changed to Clearwater Springs) was so popular that it was an official Trailway’s Bus Stop, back in the day. In other words, you could buy a bus ticket to Gibson’s Pool. I actually have one that I have laminated for posterity’s sake.
Mama said she could remember this one fella who would always bring his girl friend to the swimming pool. She said he always ordered one coke with two straws. When I asked why? She answered, “Because he was Tight As Dick’s Hatband.”
Mama always bought gas for the car at, what was then called, Mc Corkle’s Curve. (The curve was eliminated when highway 19 was changed to a four lane highway.) She stopped one day and was four cents short of having enough money to pay for the gas. Mr. Mc Corkle made her a ticket for four cents so she could pay it the next time she stopped for gas. Yes Sir, He was Tight As Dick’s Hatband.
Remember, I said my Mama usually used the phrase in a financial sense. She also used Tight As Dick’s Hatband to describe my clothes when they were fitting a little too snug in my teenage years. It went like this: That skirt is Tight As Dick’s Hatband…go change into something else.
Where did the phrase AS TIGHT AS DICK’S HATBAND originate?
There is a story that it refers to Richard Cromwell, the son of Oliver Cromwell, who briefly took over as Lord Protector of England in 1658 after his father’s death. Unfortunately, he was not the man his father was. He was too amiable, thrust into a position of responsibility at a time of national crisis. He was unable to reconcile the various problems in the military and Parliament. He was removed after eight months. The hatband was supposed to be a reference to the Crown of England, something he found too tight to wear with comfort.
Based on this, I can just imagine our history.
My Mama would say:
.Two sisters, one blonde and one brunette, inherit the family ranch. Unfortunately, after just a few years, they are in financial trouble.
In order to keep the bank from repossessing the ranch, they need to purchase a bull so that they can breed their own stock.
Upon leaving with $600, the brunette tells her sister, ‘When I get there, if I decide to buy the bull, I’ll contact you to drive out after me and haul it home.’
The brunette arrives at the man’s ranch, inspects the bull, and decides she wants to buy it. The man tells her that he will sell it for $599, no less. After paying him, she drives to the nearest town to send her sister a telegram to tell her the news.
She walks into the telegraph office, and says, ‘I want to send a telegram to my sister telling her that I’ve bought a bull for our ranch. I need her to hitch the trailer to our pickup truck and drive out here so we can haul it home.’
The telegraph operator explains that he’ll be glad to help her, then adds, it will cost 99 cents a word. Well, after paying for the bull, the brunette realizes that she’ll only be able to send her sister one word.
After a few minutes of thinking, she nods and says, ‘I want you to send her the word ‘comfortable.’
The operator shakes his head. ‘How is she ever going to know that you want her to hitch the trailer to your pickup truck and drive out here to haul that bull back to your ranch if you send her just the word ‘comfortable?’
The brunette explains, ‘My sister’s blonde. The word is big. She’ll read it very slowly.
‘com-for-da-bul’.
*
Right now the average wind farm is about 150 turbines. Each wind turbine needs 80 gallons of oil as lubricant and we’re not talking about vegetable oil, this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude… 12,000 gallons of it. That oil needs to be replaced once a year.
It is estimated that a little over 3,800 turbines would be needed to power a city the size of New York… That’s 304,000 gallons of refined oil for just one city. Now you have to calculate every city across the nation, large and small, to find the grand total of yearly oil consumption from “clean” energy. Where do you think all that oil is going to come from, the fricken oil fairies? Not to mention the fact that the large equipment needed to build these wind farms run on petroleum. As well as the equipment required for installation, service, maintenance, and eventual removal.
And just exactly how eco-friendly is wind energy anyway? Each turbine requires a footprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm of 150 turbines needs 225 acres; In order to power a city the size of NYC you’d need 57,000 acres; and who knows the astronomical amount of land you would need to power the entire US. All of which would have to be clear-cut land because trees create a barrier & turbulence that interferes with the 20mph sustained wind velocity necessary for the turbine to work properly (also keep in mind that not all states are suitable for such sustained winds). Boy, cutting down all those trees is gonna piss off a lot of green-loving tree-huggers.
Let’s talk about disposal now. The lifespan of a modern, top quality, highly efficient wind turbine is 20 years. After that, then what? What happens to those gigantic fiber composite blades? They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced, repurposed, or recycled so guess what..? It’s off to special landfills they go.
And guess what else..? They’re already running out of these special landfill spaces for the blades that have already exceeded their usefulness. Seriously! Those blades are anywhere from 120 ft. to over 200 ft. long and there are 3 per turbine. And that’s with only 7% of the nation currently being supplied with wind energy. Just imagine if we had the other 93% of the nation on the wind grid… 20 years from now you’d have all those unusable blades with no place to put them.. Then 20 years after that, and 20 years after that, and so on. Golly gee, how green is that?
Oops, I almost forgot about the 500,000 birds that are killed each year from wind turbine blade collisions; most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls, geese, ducks, and eagles. Apparently smaller birds are more agile and able to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, whereas the larger soaring birds aren’t so lucky. I’m sure the wildlife conservationist folks are just ecstatic about that. I’m so glad the wind energy people are looking out for the world.
