My Grannie Ruby was always a target for my practical jokes. Sometime in the late 70s I stopped by her house for a visit. She was just coming inside from picking up pecans. She had several pecan trees in her yard. Every year she would be out there slaving away picking up these pecans. The trees she had kept her supplied with pecans to use throughout the years.

She told me how disappointed she was that she wouldn’t have many pecans. She had cracked several already and a large percentage were bad. Bugs or disease had taken a toll on her pecan crop. She didn’t know whether it was even going to be worth going through them, with there being so few good ones.

That’s when I told her of a new service that was be offered out in South Austin. You could mail your pecan to them and they would X-Ray them and send you the good ones back. She thought that was a pretty good idea. At least it would save a lot of time. She wanted the address.

Rather than offering to take them (which I regretted that I had slipped up on) I wrote down the address of my office in South Austin. I was hoping she would mail them to me, and then I’d just send back a couple of pecans with a polite note giving her my regrets that only 2 pecans were all that we found that were good.

She set there for a few minutes then looked over her glasses to say, “Ron, that’s the address where your office is isn’t it and you are playing a trick on me“.

At that point I couldn’t keep a straight face. The jig was up.

After that, every year she would call to tell me she had the pecans ready to go to the x-rayer. It was a source of fun to laugh about for the next 20 or 25 years.