Springfielders of a certain age remember Harry Laybourne for his prodigious collection of Springfield area historical postcards and pictures — treasures he handed out like an evangelizer who ordered too many religious tracts.
Like most owners of Whoopy Cushions, said Laybourne’s son, “he was a prankster.”
Perhaps as evidence God intervened to adjust the Laybourne family path, the son’s playfulness centers on sounds produced at the entrance to the digestive system rather than the exit.
He is a word tinkerer who invents sayings.
Take ‘mullet-proof,’ a riff on bullet-proof.
It means bald, the condition of the scalp on which not even the weedy mullet can take root.
Then there’s “falter top.” Even hearing it exposes “wardrobe malfunction” as the invention of a bureaucrat trying cover-up of Janet Jackson’s unforgettable fumble during a Super Bowl halftime.
And, yes, Laybourne does have term for twisters of the truth: “distortionists.”
Cole Van Schoyck, who met Laybourne when both were 16 and worked as ushers at the Upper Valley Cinema, said his friend has been rewriting the language “as far back as I can remember …. So that’s 53 years.”
Van Schoyck’s personal favorite hits like a stiff jab: “He called a punch in the mouth a yammer-slammer,” to which I would like to tack on “thank you ma’mmer.”
Setting genetics aside, this all appears to have started at a childhood Christmas when his father taught him a deeply important truth about the holiday: “noel” spelled backwards is “leon.”
OK, it’s not philosophy. But given how often humor springs from messing with the order of things, it’s a sound lesson.
That kind of disorder happened to coincide with son Don’s learning style.
Don Laybourne suspects some variant of dyslexia made his school years mostly challenges getting things in the right order.
But as soon as he described the trouble that made his school years irksome, Laybourne buffed up and showed off the silver lining of that cloud. When he returned to Roosevelt Middle School, he was delighted to learn that, as a custodian, “I didn’t have to do homework.”
The end of his formal schooling kind of “freed up my mind,” he said, and found a hobby while wandering the language landscape.
The language landscape
The day we had lunch, Don Laybourne
converted the words, “ice tray,” to “ice stray,” to describe a frozen cube that shoots across the linoleum.
A trip to Dayton that took him past Lumber Liquidators and produced “slumber liquidator.”
Laybourne, like me and many others out there about to turn 70, has some regrets of having a meaner edge to his humor in his younger years. Although it carries with it a whif the bureaucrat, he now prefers the kinder, gentler “mattress moistener.”
“Pillow Squawk” — from Pillow Talk — comes from a vision of from down pillow with its feathers still attached to the goose that provided them. And wouldn’t that image make a fine cross-stitch grandma’s wall?
The Laybourne lexicon lists includes “trouble scooter,” a driver who suddenly cuts through traffic to make an exit.
A “wrenchcoat” is trendy outerwear for a mechanic; and a “lug not” a hotel employee with a suitcase allergy.
‘Slow commotion” imagines a painfully slow footage of a sloth-riot.
And “eye cue” is the brand of motherly stink-eye that silents shouts: “Don’t even think about it.”
Though “forget-me-plot” aptly describes an awful movie, it could double as the small piece of cemetery land a 90-year-old bought 70 years ago and is so angry about not remembering that he has himself cremated so he didn’t have to buy another.
We’ll finish with three more that seem to belong in the comics or cartoons.
⋅ A belly whose button hasn’t seen the light of days in the current century might be held up by a failing “futility belt.”
⋅ Homer Simpson’s bowling team might change its name to the “Gutterball Turkeys.”
⋅ “Kaboomerang” might be the word Wile E. Coyote reads on the wooden Acme box before looking at the audience as the bomb he’d intended for the Roadrunner explodes.
The apple and the tree
Don Laybourne fully realizes his father was much more than a man who kept the house in Whoopy Cushions and watched Three Stooges shorts on the basement film projector.
Like so many when they’re a few calendar pages from 70, the older Laybourne not only continued his community’s history work in retirement, “he volunteered for the Salvation Army and was working with people with disabilities,” his son said.
For that, the organization honored Laybourne in 2001 with its distinguished service award.
His father’s example — and maybe genetics — may be the reason that his son, after 25 years with the city schools, worked for a time with TAC Industries in Springfield and now drives a shuttle bus that transports people with disabilities while turning phrases.
So, remember: “noel” spelled backwards is “leon.”
Blasts from Harry’s past: Laybourne known for practical jokes
Practical joker Harry Laybourne “was a blast,” according to his son Don, who offered three blasts from his father’s history of Tom-foolery ... make that Harry-foolery.
A crude awakening
Just waking up, 15-year-old Don Laybourne saw on pillow beside him neither a kibble nor a bit, but what looked to his sleepy eye like a small clump of onetime food that that had just touched down on after completing a trip through a dog’s digestive system.
It had arrived earlier in the week in a box from the Whoopy Cushion company.
No beer here
More awkward was the scene that played out in the Laybourne home somewhere in the years when young Don had been experimenting with alcohol, as many kids do. One morning his mother walked into her kitchen, saw a Budweiser can on its side and a shiny puddle congealed beside and stomped off to the young man’s room.
The argument returned to the kitchen, where young Don insisted he didn’t even drink Budweiser, before the newspaper began to shake in the hands the man who had just done a test run with another marvelous product from his Whoopy Cushion supplier.
Trial not needed
Then came the day Harry took his hobby to work at a meeting of the staff of All-Phase Electric.
After a passage of time, proceedings were rudely interrupted by a thunderous sound of shattering glass. Most instinctively headed for the front of the building and the huge display of hanging lamps and chandeliers.
Upon their return, having found nothing disturbed, no one bothered to finger the culprit who had rigged the recording, Don Laybourne said.
“They all knew it was him.”
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