Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 19, 1994                   TAG: 9409270064
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MY SELF-ESTEEM HAS GONE THE WAY OF THE NOV SMARL KAPOKS

Shelby Foote was on the tube recently, and if you see what's left of my self-esteem let me know.

You know Shelby Foote. Good-looking guy with a white beard who has a gorgeous Mississippi accent and wears blue button-down shirts with no tie. Nobody wears those things like he does. He has done for the blue button-down shirt what Lana Turner did for the sweater.

Aside from these shirt-wearing talents, Shelby is an accomplished novelist and Civil War historian.

And he is magnificent on television. He gives great answers to all these questions and is in perfect control of himself. Most all, he makes sense.

On those rare occasions I have been on TV, I have left the impression that I am an overweight cretin with a mush-mouthed middle Shenandoah Valley accent whose neck is too big to wear button-down shirts.

Shelby's answers are crisp. I mumble and invent words and phrases that are alien to the English tongue and Mississippi. Not to mention Virginia.

A couple of years ago I went on public-access television with two of my 1944 Radford High School classmates. We were there to tell how life had been in Radford in the 1940s.

The classmates were kind of like Shelby Foote. I was more like myself.

If it had been as bad as I imagine it was, I would have been run out of town. But I seem to remember it may have gone like this:

Interviewer: Well, Ben, what can you tell us about your young years in Radford?

Me: Well, like this ah-ah was good because ah-ah there were no ickblotas for us to ah-ah fool with. That is ah-ah with the exception of the nov smarl kapoks we used to have.

I burned my copy of the tape. But they played it, in the name of heaven, at the 50th class reunion. Which was a kind of nov smarl kapok thing to do, if you ask me.

I know what you positive thinkers out there are going to tell me to do to get my self-esteem back.

You're going to say, chill out, Bennie, and get some blue button-downs with collars that aren't all pilled up and limp. Let your beard grow and work on your diction.

I've got some 19-inch button-downs that aren't pilled up all that much. And I might be able to work on my diction a little bit.

But I get an awful rash when I try to grow a beard - which apparently was never a problem for Shelby Foote or Robert Edward Lee.

Let's face it, pal, I'll always be an ickblota.