August 11‘01
Volume 268
Dot Bell Celebrating 25 Years
Dot Bell, a family friend, has
In time, Dot and I became good friends, too. Other than my wife, there are less than five, maybe less than three, women that I can count whose friendships are as strong and deep as that which I share with Dot Bell. Mind you I don't share my deepest fears and most secret thoughts with Dot, but she's the sort of friend with whom I'd be comfortable in so doing, and she'd not think any less of me. Such friends are heaven sent. Barbara worked as the church's secretary following the retirement of Dot Hardin in 1974, through the final days of Dr. Levon Moore's tenure and managed to struggle through a tumultuous era prior to our church calling Gordon Sansing as pastor in 1976. As Barbara tendered her resignation in the summer of '76, she contacted her friend Dot to let her know the church would soon need a Church Secretary. Barbara remembered Dot had served as secretary at First Baptist in New Albany in the early days of her marriage to Jerry and felt Dot might be interested in the position. Dot told me in a recent interview that she had really planned to wait until Leah, her three year old, started to school before she re-entered the workforce, and that for about two weeks she really struggled with the decision. Yet, one afternoon as she was picking butter beans in the garden, her oldest son, Tim, called her to the phone. Only minutes before, Dot had prayed for guidance and a sign if it were God's will for her to go back to work. A representative from what amounted to a personnel committee was the caller, and he wanted to know if she would be interested in the secretarial position, and would she meet formally with the committee for an interview. Twenty-five years ago on August 01, 1976, Dot Bell became the Church Secretary at First Baptist Church, Pontotoc. In those twenty-five years, she has served faithfully during tenures of five different pastors and with an admirable sense of loyalty to each. Dot stated that she and her oldest daughter, Cindy, recently counted thirty-five different staff members with whom she has worked in the past twenty-five years. I asked her if she had a favorite pastor. She replied that she did, but to be fair to all the other pastors, whom she also admired, she asked that her favorite not be revealed. She has allowed me to say that Ed Deuschle holds a special place in her heart as he helped shepherd the Bell Family through the loss of their son, Tim, who died in a motor vehicular accident. About our current pastor, Dot said, "Bro. Ken…you can't help but like him!" I also asked Dot to describe the biggest changes or adjustments she had faced at work in her twenty-five years of service as Church Secretary. "Computers!" she bellowed with a hardy laugh, "Or maybe, going to a copier from a mimeograph machine. It's all easier, though, once you get used to it." When quizzed about the best part of being the Church Secretary, Dot joked, "The salary," but went on to explain that her work was so enjoyable that sometimes she hated to take the money. "It's probably the atmosphere," she continued on a more serious note. "It's not like when I worked for Futorian. There's no foul language, here. It's also the love and support I get from the church family." "Well, tell me about last Wednesday," I prodded, referring to a special treat she enjoyed on August 1. "To start with," she laughed, "I wore the ugliest thing in my closet to work that day. It was a terrible morning with me trying to get information typed into the computer. I had to get up and down several times, and somehow I deleted the information and had to start over. I told Laura (bookkeeper) to just lock me in, and I would work through lunch. Right at twelve o'clock I heard some voices. I turned around to see Jerry with a black man who was dressed in a white shirt and black pants. I looked around again, and there everybody stood just staring at me." "I heard Bro. Ken say, 'Dot, your limo has arrived.'" "My what?" "Your limo." "We all went outside and piled into the limo, and they took me to Kirk's Grill. It wouldn't have surprised me if we'd gone through McDonald's drive-thru, because that's the kind of preacher we have," she elaborated, referring to our practical-joke-loving pastor. "Christy May was there," Dot bragged, reveling in the honor of having Miss Mississippi 2000 on hand to crown her. "Bro. Ken said, 'Dot, we're gonna crown you queen for the day,'" she continued. "Then Lewis Harrell (newest staff member) brought out a robe for me to put on, one he had picked up at the church. They had flowers for me from the staff and the kids. We had lunch, and then we went back to the church and worked." "Were other people eating with y'all?" "No, we were in a private room, but when we went in they wished me a happy twenty-fifth, I'll bet folks thought it was my wedding anniversary. I know they didn't think I was twenty-five," she replied with a smile. The talk of practical jokes brought back a few memories that Dot shared. She remembered the time Gordon Sansing and James Tutor taped fireworks to the rollers on her chair, the kind that explode when smashed, and thus relived a few tense moments from the seventies. A few years later Jim Hess and Gordon Sansing returned from visitation to find the church office empty, so they locked Dot out of the office and hid themselves in the pastor's office. Dot had gone to the preschool department to pop some popcorn and returned to find herself in predicament with phones ring off the hook and no one to answer them. Jim and Gordon were using the second line to dial the main line. Perhaps the most amusing tale she told occurred when the Sansings had left town for a few days and asked Dot to tend to the goldfish belonging to their younger son, Brian. "I was changing the water in the fish bowl, and the fish slipped down the drain," Dot recalled. "I didn't know what to do, so I called Mr. Tutor (custodian). He brought a wet vacuum over and sucked that little fish out of the drain. It didn't look too healthy and had a lot of scales missing, plus it swam sideways." Dot motioned with her hands the movement of a flounder to explain the motion of the sickly fish. "That same day, Gordon called to see if anything was going on" she continued. "I told him that Mr. Tutor had been fishing. Gordon wanted to know if he caught anything, and I said he sure did. He caught one." By that point in her recollection, Dot was overcome with laughter and almost unable to continue. She believes she ended up buying Brian another fish. "That's just a few of the things that went on," she recalled fondly. "We worked, too!" My final question for Dot related to her plans for the future. "I know I won't be able to work another twenty-five years," she laughed. "I guess I'll retire sometime, though Bro. Ken says I can't retire until he does. I can't imagine not working at the church. I'll just have to wait and see." In the past twenty-five years, the Dot Bell I know has faced adversity on numerous occasions, and in every case has maintained a selfless, sweet spirit. Her mettle has been tested, and to her credit she has become a better person under conditions that would have caused the vines of bitterness to enshroud weaker individuals. I don't expect she'll want to work another twenty-five years, but I'll support her in her determination to work as long as she possibly can. God bless you, Dot Bell. May He enlarge your territory. May His hand be upon you, and may He keep you from evil.
Dot Com Web Wonders It's not been very many years ago that a name such as Dot Com would have been mistaken for that of a member of the fairer sex. However, in the "un"-capitalized form, "dot com" refers to a classification of websites on the Internet. In fact, so prevalent are dot coms that if one were to set about registering a website as a dot com, he or she would likely find all the simple names of five letters and less are used up and unavailable. Perhaps I should explain what dot com represents. On the Internet, websites have specific names and are defined as URLs. A URL is an acronym for Universal Resource Locator. A typical URL fits the format of http://www.myname.com, where the "http" stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, the "www" represents World Wide Web" and "myname" is representative of a personal or business name, and "com" denotes the site as "commercial." Since a decimal point or dot is used to separate the website's name from its extension, "dot com" is a generic way of referring to a site on the Internet, and might be used in a sentence such as "What is your company's dot com address?" Back before Al Gore thought about inventing the Internet (snicker), scientific communities at colleges and universities had linked themselves electronically through a complex computer network that spanned the country. As the Internet grew, URLs also grew and soon differentiated educational sites as a dot edu (example www.olemiss.edu) from commercial sites (www.pillsbury.com). Corporations that provided an Internet service often adopted a "dot net" ("net" for network) extension. So, while the commercial website for AT&T might be www.att.com, their Internet service site would be www.att.net. Business organizations that are neither commercial nor educational or network choose a "dot org" extension with "org" being the logical abbreviation of organization. For the better part of two years, I have been considering registering a domain name for the online version of this newsletter. There is some expense involved, and since expenses for this newsletter continue to rise, I continued to use the free services offered by certain websites. The small monthly membership fee that I pay to CompuServe also buys me a limited amount of disk space for a website on their computer's server. When RRN Online outgrew the space provided by CompuServe, I chose to post some of the files on Tripod and later on the Go Network. When Go shut down their free space, I move those files over to BellSouth. Keeping up with all of it is a bit of a hassle, but it was mostly free. As interest in this newsletter grew, I longed for a simpler name for my website, or something that folks could easily remember. A logical choice might have been www.ridgerider.com except that it was already taken, as were the dot net and dot org sites. I really would like to have www.rrn.com because of its simplicity, but the guy that owns that dot com name wanted $2,500 for it. My friends in California registered www.ridgeridernews.com before I thought of doing so. I thought of using rrnews.com, but it too was registered. My hope was to keep the domain name as close to the name of the newsletter as possible and still use a dot com, though my site was not a commercial site. Most people who use the Internet think of dot com more readily than dot org or other domain. I had almost decided to use www.bodock.com when someone registered it a week or two after I discovered that it was available. At one point I considered using my name, but found combinations of wcarter and wlcarter and waynecarter already registered. I considered words revolving around grape, because Pontotoc means "land of hanging grapes." However grape, grapevine, grapenews, grapesite, etc, were taken. Once I waxed creatively insightful and thought of www.rrnsite.com only to be disappointed to learn it too was registered. I remembered that Pontotoc County had a community named Whodathoughtit, and when I checked on the availability of that name, it was also registered. The only unregistered dot com name I could think of that remotely had anything to do with the title of this newsletter was "ridgelines." I almost registered it, but Sarah didn't like it. Sarah is too much like our mother for me to want to listen to her for the rest of my life or her life telling me, "I told you not to pick ridgelines dot com. That's a stupid name. What's it got to do with Ridge Rider News?" My explanation that when I am one day no longer a Ridge Rider, but retired, the name Ridgelines might be more suitable, all seemed to fall on deaf ears. I still might register that name, but upon the advice of my wife, who saw nothing wrong with a dot org name, I chose to register rrnews.org as the domain name for the online version of this newsletter. It was not my first choice, but as with late arrivals at the movie theater expecting to find a front row seat and late arrivals to a church service expecting to find a back row seat, I accepted my plight and found a solution that appealed to me. Brett Carter Brown, my nephew, is an English major at Ole Miss. Additionally, Brett is a fairly accomplished computer guru and has recently learned a bit about designing websites. In conjunction with registering my own domain name, I asked Brett to redesign my website. He accepted the task enthusiastically and has given my website a crisp, clean look with a greater degree of functionality. It's hard to say whether I am prouder of my domain name, www.rrnews.org, or the newly designed website. I am well pleased with both. Now, when someone with a computer and Internet access asks you how they can subscribe to this newsletter, tell them it's free on the Internet at "rrnews dot org." They'll know what you mean.
Bodock Beau Heavenly Justice The editor is not the only writer on the staff who's tickled about the new domain name and website. I've now got my very own email address. So, instead of folks sending their jokes to the editor, they can send them to me at beau@rrnews.org. Isn't that something? Life often seems unfair, and Christians are prone to look forward to living in Heaven where perfect justice is the order of the day. Keep this in mind as you read a submission from Dena Kimbrell. THE PEARLY GATES
Saint Peter addresses this guy, "Who are you, so 
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seemed like one of the family for approximately thirty
years. When Barbara and I moved to Pontotoc in 1970, Dot and Jerry Bell and
three of their first four children had been calling Pontotoc home for two
years. Jerry worked as an undertaker for Baldwin Funeral Home, while Dot
honed her homemaker skills as a stay-at-home mom. Through association with
First Baptist Church, Barbara and Dot became good friends. Perhaps, each
identified with the other one, as both had been transplanted there from other
parts, Dot from New Albany and Barbara from Ripley.