Badger Shelton, dead 13 years, and my brother, dead 9 months, and me, still alive, were chased by a cop, danced with a big, red elephant after we joined Death to become pals with Mr. Lone Ranger

 Scott Shelton, my brother, Eric, and I were dancing and cavorting between the four legs of the giant elephant and tugging, salaciously, on his trunk.
I wish we could do it again, but Scott died 13 years ago January 23 (today as I write a quick, no-edit tale of glory). My brother died last spring.  They were among my closest pals. Most of my closest pals are dead, by the way. They all were glad they knew me, and I hope they'll  tell God to have mercy on my soul when the counting’s done.
But Scott and Eric were with me on the day we met Mr. Lone Ranger, befriending him for life, and later doing our best at evading the law and dancing with the elephant down on the boulevard.
The elephant dance came maybe 15 minutes after my life-or-death attempt to escape Kentucky State Trooper Rudy, who was damned determined to make sure we followed the rule of law in Christian County, Kentucky.
As Rudy chased my old, faded-yellow Dodge Duster with its slant-six engine and apparently failing brakes, Scott – who was in the back seat – leaned over my shoulder and kept on urging me to “run for the border.”
“He can’t follow us into Tennessee,” Scott said. “Let’s go, Flap…. You can make it.”
My brother, Eric, wasn’t much help, either. He just tightened up his seat belt and laughed, looking over his shoulder to see Trooper Rudy closing in on us as I did my best to elude the long arm of the law on U.S. 41A. “Fucker’s gonna get you, Timmy,” he said. “Either go faster or pull over.”
Not wanting the trooper to begin firing his .44 Magnum at my tires (which weren’t so good to begin with), I succumbed to common sense and a will to live – I used to have that – and I nursed the Duster up onto the shoulder of the highway.  The only thing other than trees and fields in sight was a long, seemingly endless white, wooden fence.  Cattle farm obviously. Or perhaps it was a place to ride your horse till you can’t no more.
I’ve told this story before, and it involves all kinds of legal treachery in the courts system of Christian County, Kentucky.  The facts are mostly the same, depending on when I’m telling the tale and how much sleep or whiskey I had the night before. “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, God,” I pledged on the Bible in the courtroom where I ended up a week or two after the feverish attempt to make it to the Tennessee line (even though we were still miles from that goal.)

Rob "Death" Dollar, Scott "Badger" Shelton, Mr. Lone Ranger, me "Flapjacks" Ghianni. My brother, Eric, took this picture. We also took one with him in it. Scott died 13 years ago January 23, 2025. My brother died in the spring of 2024. The Lone Ranger also is dead. Rob and I live on, and are damn proud of it. Instead of mourning Scott on this deathiversary, I choose to tell a true story of truth, injustice by Trooper Rudy, salvation and a red, concrete elephant.  

I jumped ahead of myself there.  You see, I was in court because Trooper Rudy – a kind and laughing fellow – didn’t buy my Lone Ranger defense as an excuse for driving too fast on HIS highway, and he gave me a ticket that I ended up taking to trial. The judge didn’t buy my Lone Ranger defense nor my explanation that I usually drive much faster than that.
The law-and-order segment of this tale can be found in other blogs and in the journalism classic expose “When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & their Shades of Glory.”
My time in court is legendary in Christian County, primarily because of my Lone Ranger defense (“I am a friend of The Lone Ranger”). I had thought of using a different tactic, telling the judge I was driven to break the law because of the death of Chico the Monkey, but I decided I wouldn’t. Instead of The Lone Ranger trial, as it’s been dubbed among State Police and judges in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it would have been “Tim’s Monkey Trial.”
Interesting, but certainly not accurate. Chico, you may recall, was a spider or squirrel monkey whose escape from a Clarksville house sent deputies and lawmen there in a panic. “Deputies go bananas: Monkey at Large!” screamed the next day’s newspaper. Almost cost me my job, but newspaper circulation skyrocketed.
I’m getting a bit far afield here, but all of the above – including the crawling around the elephant legs – is related.
Scott, who was a News Brother dubbed “Badger,” and Eric -- who was the News Brothers’ biggest fan and who used to tell my approving mother that I was completely crazy, dreaming my life away and living that life in one of the faster lanes – were in the Duster that day, because we were going to meet another News Brother, Rob “Death” Dollar at the Dollar Estate and cat sanctuary on Sherwood Drive in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Rob and I co-founded The News Brothers, suffered dastardly at the hands of Korporate Amerikan “journalism” and also wrote the book mentioned above.
Rob was going to ride with me and the others as I drove to some sort of fairgrounds in Hoptown to meet The Lone Ranger. It was a dream come true for Baby Boomers, who grew up loving those thrilling days of yesteryear and hollering “Hi-Yo Silver” every time our mothers took a wooden spoon to our butts.
Of course, that sort of stuff happened 30 years before this adventure I’m telling you about today.  Rob had been invited to a Lone Ranger Day at the fairgrounds that was staged by a local wheeler-dealer and damn nice guy who always wanted to make movies.
There were two original, full-length movies, featuring the Lone Ranger origin story and further adventures with his virgin-white horse, Silver, and his best friend, Tonto, on his pinto, Scout.   
Then Clayton Moore, the only actor who ever should have played The Lone Ranger, spent an hour talking to all of us overgrown kids and real kids.  Me and Rob and Scott and Eric, though got more time with him.
Rob and I corralled The Lone Ranger as he was attempting to leave the celebration. He was headed outside to climb aboard Silver (the real horse was long dead, but this one looked the part) and get him to trot into the horse trailer attached to the big, pink Cadillac with longhorn horns on the hood that The Lone Ranger had driven all the way from Calabasas, California, where he lived.
“Mr. Lone Ranger, we love you,” all four of us chanted, before we started shooting the breeze with the legendary masked lawman.
I guess he spent about an hour with us, telling us wisdom of life on the trail as well as lamenting his best friend – seriously – the actor Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto and died within months of our time together in the Hoptown fairgrounds snow.
Any jokes or untruths aside, we all did form a bond with The Lone Ranger, who began calling us by our News Brothers nicknames (I was “Flapjacks” and Rob was “Death” … on this day, Eric was going by his own nickname “Big Bro", even though he was only linked by blood to perhaps the most notorious and deranged member of The News Brothers). The Lone Ranger also referred to us as “my kids,” because we represented his demographic.  I was 30ish, Rob and Scott a year or many younger, Eric a couple years older than me and a much-nicer person.
Rob and I continued to stay in contact with Mr. Lone Ranger right up until his death and several years before our own.
This is all building up though to our trip back to Clarksville, after dropping Rob off at the Dollar Estate.  I had to get to my newspaper in Clarksville, where I’d write a column about The Lone Ranger that I’d use to lead the Sunday newspaper. I think Rob had that day off, if he hadn’t already been fired for applying to be Clarksville police chief (please read our book). Eric was going to spend a part of the day in the newsroom before going to my apartment and eating my meager food and drinking my sody pop while I put out the Sunday newspaper. He might meet us for a drink at Camelot at 2 a.m. the next day.
Badger had to get back to WJZM-AM, a 50-watt station that operated out of the attic over a furniture store in downtown Clarksville.  He was news director there, and a damn good one. Rob and I formed our friendship with Badger because we always were bumping into each other at news events.
Also, Scott liked to hang out with me in the newspaper newsroom, where he enjoyed watching the staff reel from all of the exploding cigarettes and rubber vomit involved in putting out a quality newspaper.
Interestingly – to me, not you – is the fact that Scott’s Dad, Bill, had become my friend before Scott did.  Bill was the nicest older gentleman in Clarksville. He enjoyed my regular columns and stories about his town. So, instead of just calling to say something, he started coming in and sitting in the chair by my desk.
 He would tell me tales that made me laugh, fill me in on local history, talk about his family, ask who the fuck I was and why I was in Clarksville, anyway? Many stories came from our visits. If it was a news nugget, I’d pass it on to Rob, Richard “The Marine” Worden or to Harold “The Stranger” Lynch – depending on the year and who was working at the paper and alive at that point. I was in Clarksville many years, too many, but I had a demon to shed before I left town. That’s a long and sad, remorseful tale and 40 years in my past, now.
Bill several times asked me to quit smoking. “The cigarettes always win,” he said, preaching and beseeching me.  I did quit, but not until 2000, long after I became the burnt toast of Nashville media.
But this really is supposed to be about Scott. Well, not really. I wrote a long and teary farewell to him when he died, and I’ve saluted him some in my blogs in recent years.
Today, instead of being somber, I choose to revisit the day we met The Lone Ranger and danced between the giant elephant legs.   
You see, after the trauma of the $80 ticket for allegedly doing well over the speed limit on Trooper Rudy’s highway, I continued driving the Duster home. That path goes right through Oak Grove, Kentucky, back then best known for the Cat West strip joint. Stripped all the way down to the vagina. The subsequent raids and illegal activity among city officials who loved to witness flesh on a pole and didn’t mind the related drug and sex-trafficking activity led to us establishing a one-column spot on the top of the front page. We called it the “Cat West Corner.”
It was a way for newspaper execs to have it both ways.  If it was a Cat West story or perhaps a story about raids of my truly good friend Connie Lampe’s two brothels, it went up in that corner of the paper. They didn’t want me to put it in the main three-column spot with sensational headlines like “Bare breasts titillate Fort Campbell soldiers” or “Connie’s Whores told to squeeze their business assets shut.”    
That main three-column spot was for Wendell Wilson’s “serious” news stories that always began “The City Council met last night and ….” Substitute County Commission…. School Board …. Chamber of Commerce … or any other government body that met.  
When Wendell became city editor, the reporters – Jerry Manley, John Staed, Harold Lynch, Rob Dollar, Greg Kuhl, Elise Frederick, etc. did not write leads that stale, so Wendell rewrote them.
Ooops, I may get back to this section when I have the desire, but today’s entry is about Scott Shelton, who, like Harold and Kuhl, and most of my friends are dead or mentally infirm.
Anyway, this is supposed to be about me and Scott and the elephant, not about his death 13 years ago.
As we drove down toward Clarksville and our mutual workplaces, we had to pass through and across the highway from Fort Campbell, the sprawling Army post where the 101^st Airborne (Air Assault) rests when not keeping their Rendezvous With Destiny (their division slogan, basically meaning that in all American wars, the 101^st is the first division in and the last out. Look it up. It’s impressive. 
Soldiers, in addition to seeing naked women either as entertainment or as professionals, also enjoy liquor.
On the left side of Fort Campbell Boulevard stood a full-size red, cement elephant, an eye-catching beast that helped this liquor store stand out from all the others and the neon bars and too-many (from my perspective) barber shops, like Buddy’s, run by a toothy fellow who liked to tease me about my hair. “Fuck you, Buddy,” I’d say. And the shorn soldiers would laugh.
As Arlo Guthrie told me long ago, you can get anything you want on Fort Campbell Boulevard. Or shit, maybe that was his dad, Humphrey.
Scott, who did not normally venture this far north of Clarksville, immediately focused his eyes on the massive, red elephant.
“Flap, let’s stop here and look at the elephant,” he said in his best news radio voice.
I think he was suggesting this as a way to get me – I am medicated OCD – from dwelling about the basically full-week’s take-home that Trooper Rudy and his judge pal were going to extort from me.
So, I pulled the Duster onto the broken-asphalt, yellow-striped parking lot and we got out.
I went in the store and asked simply: “Can me and my friend and my brother play with your elephant, sir?”
You’d be surprised what people agree to, if you are polite.
So, while my brother filmed on the Super 8mm camera I’d stolen from my Dad, Badger and I played elephant tag and came up with words that rhyme with “trunk.”
It was like two little kids in a playground, discovering a new teeter-totter (“See-saw, Marjorie Daw,” we’d always chirp when on those devices).
I told Eric to take his turn, and I held the camera. If you ever heard either my brother or my friend Badger laugh, you’ll not forget it.
Hell, it even almost drowned out the clatter as the sun reached noon over Fort Campbell Boulevard.
Unfortunately, that film, like a lot of that we shot back then, has faded or been displaced.  Rob and I did a whole Johnny Carson Show on film one night, and that’s gone as well. And the L-C rooftop scene, where Badger, Death, Danny Adkins and Tennessee Williams watched as I almost tripped and fell three floors to Commerce Street while filming also is gone.
But when I think of that day, of many days, spent with Scott -- who used to let me sneak on the radio airwaves with Jimmy in the Morning (also dead) and spin “Helter Skelter,” which both deplored -- today I’m not really dwelling on his death all those years ago.
I’m thinking about the fun we had, the laughs we shared. I’m also thinking about Trooper Rudy and his refusal to accept my plea that “we’re all friends with The Lone Ranger” as an excuse to let me get out of the ticket.
I think about my friend, Death, who is alive and as well as can be, on Sherwood in Hopkinsville.  He rescues cats and takes care of all generations of Dollars. Despite political differences, we love each other.
I think about all the guys who were my friends – really, since I was a workaholic, my only real friends have been those I met in the newspaper business – and who have died. I’m basically alone in this world, at least in terms of friends.
On that subject, I always think about my brother, whose fairly recent death keeps me awake in the middle of the night.
But then I think about the red elephant and how much fun we had being silly, even though we could claim “Mr. Lone Ranger,” as we addressed him, as our friend.
I dropped Scott off at the radio station and took my brother to my apartment before I went to work for the day. Thank God Harold, not Wendell, was the Saturday reporter. One day when he was the Saturday reporter, he was our “cover” as me and Rob and Jerry “Chuckles” Manley and John “Street” Staed ambushed American astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn. He, too, remained our friend until the end of his final countdown.   
At 2 a.m. the morning after The Lone Ranger’s friendship was ours, I was sitting with Rob and Jimmy in the Morning at Buford Thaxton’s rambunctious Camelot club, telling the story of Badger, Eric and me and the red elephant that lifted my mood after enduring police cruelty. My brother came in to join us. Rob fiddled with my Lone Ranger mask, that Clayton Moore had signed. We were hoping Scott would show up. Fuck, let’s just assume he did.
 Life has its ups and downs. See-saw, Marjorie Daw.