The Toilet Papers

Shelter-In-Place III:

My Rolled Yards

or

"The Toilet Papers”

by Jamie Jobb

Today was a good day, strategically speaking. Eighteen days into our “shelter-in-place”, I came home from my intermittent hunter-gather expedition with TWO packs of toilet paper! Granted, they’re very skimpy packets of only four rolls each. But they were two-ply! That beats the last six-roll pack of one-ply which a grocery clerk rescued from storage for me two weeks ago. Our situation became dire after our last Costco run which coincided with the first day of The Panic Runs, so to speak. The Big Box Store had flushed itself of paper towels too. So we’ve been running low on two of life’s essentials for over a month.

Actually I was quite lucky to get the two packets today as Safeway’s One-Per-Customer limit was still in effect. Fortunately for me it was just after 6 a.m. and few people were in the store. After ringing up the sale, the checkout woman whispered she wouldn’t notice if I left the store, came back in and got another roll to take to the only other checker working that morning. Sure enough, that worked and I got our second pack.

Another clerk they call “Junky” (it’s an Philippine thing) says he’ll save me another packet (or two) Friday morning. “Just be there again at 6 a.m.” he warns. I mark that on my calendar with a note to get to sleep early the night before. Oh, how quickly does The Post-Modern Hunter/Gather adapt to ever-changing conditions of our new wildling conurbation!

Most of us recall days not long past, when toilet paper and paper towels were not endangered species. Who knew a pandemic with more impact on lungs than guts would cause such a ridiculous run on the supply chain? Things are so dire that, according to The South China Morning Post, an armed trio of thugs stole 600 rolls in a Hong Kong panic-buyer heist in February outside a supermarket in Mong Kok. Two were arrested, their knife confiscated and their haul estimated to be worth US$220.

A few of us fondly may recall those far more distant days when there was more than enough toilet paper in the world for groups of teenagers to leisurely hang it from trees.

(pause)

I guess I should explain.

* * *

Most Americans of a certain generation – those who came of age between The Depression and Climate Change – have heard about somebody’s place getting “TP’d”. Meaning their humble abode (especially its landscape) was delicately draped in scores of streaming toilet paper banners hung high from above, as if by Zeus itself.

Actually the rolls were deftly tossed by human hands. Particularly gifted were those paper pitchers who could lob a streaming roll over, around and through 50-foot oaks, without wasting one sheet off the roll. I never did appreciate that term – “to TP” someone. It sounded too Native American to me. And there was a far better expression for the covert operation.

In Alabama we called it “rolling yards” – a more proactive term. Folks there still use the term. And, it was an activity that I engaged in willingly, with friends a dozen times as a sophomore and junior at Birmingham’s West End High School. When I moved to Miami we only rolled two yards (both in luxurious Coral Gables), and Florida kids did NOT call it “rolling”. Those sun-burned wimps!

Two of my Alabama rolling friends are deceased, so naming them now could not embarrass them. My two main cohorts were pals from West End’s football team: Bobby Atcheson, our starting fullback, and Roy Sims, a B-team quarterback. I was a linebacker. When we were lucky, Joe Price might run along with us to roll a yard.

A halfback, Joe went to our cross-town rival Ramsay High, but his brother was starting center at Auburn, aka “the loveliest village on the plains” (more on that later). So Joe was very cool with us. And he was a rolling expert: he had lots of ways to toss the rolls: overhand, underhand, hook shots. He had “the touch” we all envied. A Steph Curry, well ahead of his time.

If Joe couldn’t go rolling, Bobby usually drove and was our ring-leader, although I recall Sims and I were the go-to roll-gatherers. We’d collect our toilet paper one roll at a time. It wasn’t easy, this self-imposed One-Roll-Limit. In a fast-food place full of people, you couldn’t just pop in and out of the restroom because our mission would be obvious, and we’d blow our cover!

I should further explain: The unspoken, unwritten rules in Birmingham were quite clear to those of us obeying them. Rule Number One: You absolutely could NOT purchase toilet paper for these public displays of disaffection, which almost always involved boyfriend vs. girlfriend (and usually Bobby’s girlfriends). No, no, no! We had to spend most of the night running around town, from filling station to restaurant to any available public restroom, “borrowing” the stuff.

It was all sleight-of-hand and very seat-of-our-pants. We stuffed a roll into our crotch and waddled out with it. Our night progressed like this: one roll at a time. Thus all the time it took. Three hours allowed four guys to collect enough rolls for decent visual effect.

Of course, I’m now recalling this during the Great Covid-19 Toilet Paper Crisis. Today, on April Fools Day – with San Francisco’s annual St. Stupid’s Day parade cancelled – it’s now very difficult to imagine any such foolish activity. Nobody – not even fools – are hanging toilet paper in trees these days.

* * *

The greatest “rolling” effort I ever saw did not involve me directly, but my teenage son. I just woke up to find it. And it wasn’t in Alabama, it was in California in our town outside San Francisco. So of course, West Coast kids called it a TP job.

My son obviously had annoyed someone in his senior class, maybe a fellow baseball player. And it must have been a big deal: he wouldn’t talk about it, none of his friends would say anything either.

But we lived next to an incredible creekside canopy of Quercus lobata (California white oak or “valley oak”) in a forest of at least two dozen trees. Our house was not under the oaks, which sat between us and the road. But those trees loomed over our neighborhood.

Based on my own vast Alabama experience, I know it must have taken at least six kids and maybe 60 rolls to do that much coverage. Certainly these suburban students bought all those rolls. But they were very quiet and very effective in their work. My windows were open and I slept facing the trees, so any loud disturbance would have awakened me. I assume it must have been a mix of athletes and art students, given the perfect pitch and precise installation of their exhibit.

I first saw their work on my way out to get the morning paper. I crossed the creek and looked up to see a gentle breeze slowly sway hundreds of 80-foot long strands of plush two-ply. I was struck by the sheer beauty of it all!

And it looked incredible from the street. When I came back into the house, my son was eating breakfast. I said “There’s a surprise for you in the oaks outside. Take some bags with you, so you can clean it up.”

Funny, I thought in that moment, not once in Alabama did we ever consider the parents of the girlfriends’ yards we had rolled. And, given the time and the residue of Southern Hospitality, we actually knew those parents!

* * *

Auburn’s notorious Toomer's Corner oaks – basking in their former glory! 

The State of Alabama hosted perhaps the most notorious Rolled Trees of all time, those known as “Toomer’s Oaks” which grew at the entrance of the Auburn University campus across the street from Toomer’s Drugs. After major football wins by the Auburn Tigers, fans would “roll The Oaks”. The hundred-year-old Auburn trees needed no introduction in The Deep South. Tales of Toomer’s Oaks were legend across Dixie, or at least in the Southeastern Conference.

But things got ugly in 2011 when those oaks suddenly upped and died, as they say down South. It turns out, a transplanted Alabama fan, Harvey Almorn Updyke, Jr., pled guilty to poisoning the famous oaks shortly after Auburn miraculously beat ‘Bama, 28-27, in the 2010 Iron Bowl, when the Crimson Tide blew a 24-point lead.

Updyke spent 70 days in Lee County jail and was ordered to pay a $800,000 fine. That figure was well beyond his means, so the court ordered him to pay $500 a month. But Harvey payed less than $5,000 in six years, so the Court ordered him back before the bench to explain why he did the deed yet refused the fine.

But Updyke had already explained why, on the radio. Right after the incident happened. Updyke called Paul Finebaum’s talk show to confess. It was quite a stunning admission of guilt by a guy who did not grow up in The Cotton State, where he came to learn the new term for what he’d known as a Longhorn to be simply: “TP’d”. Here’s what he said on the radio:

“When Bear Bryant died, I was livin’ in Texas. And I didn’t really understand the Alabama-Auburn rivalry. But a good friend of mine that lived in Birmingham sent me a copy of the newspaper showing the Auburn students rolling Toomer's Corner celebratin’ Bryant’s death … Let me tell you what I did: The weekend after the Iron Bowl I went to Auburn, Alabama cause I live 30 miles away, and I poisoned the two Toomer’s trees … I put Spike 80DF in ‘em.”

Of course, Updyke undid himself in that call-in confession which was traced to his phone. But the story of Toomer's trees did not end with Updyke’s tale of woe. Auburn’s arborist attempted to save the poisoned trees, but was unsuccessful. So The Corner was redone, tainted soil removed and two fully-grown Southern Live Oaks planted where the old trees grew.

Students and fans were admonished not to roll the new trees until they acclimated.  But in 2016 the trees had to be replaced a second time after an intoxicated German Jochen Wiest set one of them on fire after Auburn’s controversial last-second 18-13 win over LSU. Neither tree grew well after that vandalism, so the University again replanted in February 2017 with new trees.

Toomer’s trees after an Alabama fan poisoned them in 2011

The Moral of These Stories

Given that Alabama governor Kay Ivey has yet to issue a full statewide stay-at-home order, Toomer’s trees are not yet out-of-the-woods, so to speak. But at least, we’re all old enough now to know what we didn’t know then:

Toilet paper does not grow on trees!

1 April 2020
(last of three parts)