By Jeremy Weldon

Editor

It’s been years since I thought about my Rambo knife, but reading over the Jail Log this week reminded me of that long-lost treasure of my youth.

The Rambo knife, readers may recall, was a survival style weapon made popular by a Sylvester Stallone movie in the glory days of the early 80s when Ronald Reagan was president and the rest of the world respected and feared the USA.

The knife had an 8-inch blade that was sharp on the bottom and serrated for sawing along the top. It came in a leather-style sheath, but the real beauty of the Rambo knife was in the handle.

Here was stored everything a person might need to survive in the wilderness or jungle for any length of time necessary. It came with a couple of matches, a few little gadgets, and a needle with thread. The handle end screwed off and all the goodies were inside. The cap that screwed on was nifty, too, because it was a floating compass under a glass bubble.

I was 12 years old when First Blood was released and my buddies and I first saw a Rambo knife.  As a side note, it’s interesting to know they made the film for $15 million and it grossed $125 million at the box office alone. It’s earned several hundred million dollars since in various forms. If you’ve seen the movie, you remember the knife.

Stallone is a special forces veteran who wanders into a small town looking for an old Army buddy. The sheriff (Brian Dennehey) roughs him up and when deputies try to shave him and give him a firehose shower he has flashbacks and escapes.

This is where the Rambo knife came in. Stallone (John Rambo) runs into the mountains and the rest of the movie is about the National Guard and State Patrol and a local posse trying to catch him. During the manhunt Stallone uses the Rambo knife all the time to survive. He kills a hog with the blade, makes fire with the matches, and even sews up a deep wound on his arm using the needle and thread.

The Rambo knife was the Holy Grail of cool things for 12-year-old Delta boys. We all wanted one, but they were extremely hard to find. In 1982 Amazon was still a river in South America and you certainly couldn’t go online to order something from it.

Some kid’s dad brought one back from a trip to Tupelo and we were jealous. The flea market on Third Street in Memphis had them, we heard, but nobody had a way to get there.

You could send $10 to an address in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine, but we were afraid to send cash in the mail. Besides, the only place to get Soldier of Fortune was the Chinese Grocery and we weren’t supposed to go in there because they sold Hustler right on the front counter!

Finally, some store in Clarksdale, a pawn shop I think, got a supply and then everybody had one. They were cheap, made in Hong Kong, and not nearly as great as they looked in the movie. The blades were dull and the caps would never screw on enough to keep the handle watertight, so the matches got wet anyway.

Remember with me, if you will, all the times in your own lives when there was something you just had to have. Can you remember what it felt like to want that special something really, really bad? And then how happy we were to finally get it? There’s been lots of things like that over the years for me, and now that I’ve nearly finished playing the front nine, I often laugh at how silly those things were, and how foolish it was to want them so badly.

Most of them, like the Rambo knife, were a disappointment in the end. Sure, there are some things that were worth waiting for. Things we’ve kept all these years. But, the great wants were mostly trivial and useless clutter in the whole scheme of life.

It’s fun, and necessary, to remember these things, I think. To recall how, and why, our passions change over time. There are lessons to learn in these reflections, and valuable to our sanity as we ease over the hill.

Oh, back to the Jail Log, and the thing that reminded me of the Rambo knife this week. Some chap was booked on charges of disorderly conduct and hitchhiking. Hitchhiking! Who knew it was against the law? I tried to imagine the circumstances of this great crime, and I could only think of First Blood and John Rambo.

See, that’s what Rambo was doing – walking and hitchhiking – when the whole trouble started. Before the movie was over he had almost burned the entire town and took down most of the lawmen and military guys. And it all started with hitchhiking.

Whenever they booked our man into the jail, I hope they checked him for a Rambo knife and let him take his own shower.