Newspaper Days – The Diamond King

In one of my earlier posts about my small town newspaper days, I mentioned a fellow named Ed, who lived in the infamous East of Snowflake area in northern Arizona. Ed was the man who wanted me to send an undercover reporter out to his property because a UFO had landed and little aliens were running around the place.

Ed was well known in that area for his massive “diamonds.” Anybody who knew Ed knew about his diamonds, and he was always eager to show them to you. They were actually large crystals, something found quite often in that part of the country. But don’t waste your breath trying to tell Ed that. He knew his were not crystals, they were diamonds. His theory was that the engines of the spaceships that frequently visited his property generated such massive heat  as they took off they super-heated the sand and formed diamonds. He just knew he was a millionaire with his outer space gemstones, and everybody else just kind of shrugged it off because that was Ed.

When Terry and I first met, she was running a commercial glass shop that did everything from residential windows and storefronts to automotive glass, and she advertised in my weekly newspaper. It was always amazing how quickly she could swap out the windshield on something. When the snowplows got a cracked or broken windshield, they were off the road until it was replaced, so those drivers didn’t have time to waste. They would come into her place, where she always kept several of the right sized windshields in stock, and ask for one of the guys to replace it. Terry would send them to the back shop, and while they were looking for a man to come out and replace the broken windshield, she would have already climbed up onto the hood and swapped them out and was ready to hand them their invoice when they wandered back to the office.

She was also known among the local collector car crowd because she had enough contacts that she could find a windshield for anything from a 1949 Ford to a Model T, an old Chevy coupe, or a 1960s era muscle car, and she could cut flat glass windows to fit by hand.

Ed had a beautiful old 1958 Ford pickup truck with the old wrap around windshield that he acquired somewhere, and he was always stopping it at Terry’s shop because he knew she liked crystals and he always wanted to show her his diamonds. One day, when someone told him that he didn’t have diamonds, just crystals, Ed decided to prove them wrong. He walked over to the windshield of his pickup and started hammering on it with one of the fist-sized crystals, making chips all over the windshield and then turned triumphantly, saying, “See, only diamonds can cut glass!”

As far as I know, the Diamond King from East of Snowflake is still wandering around out there, finding more diamonds and just waiting for the right person to come along so he can strike it rich

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Thought For The Day – Me and my bed are perfect for each other, but my alarm clock keeps trying to break us up.