How I Met Your Grandmother "Sort of "

This is from an email we recieved recently. I thought more readers would like to see it:


I was the smallest boy in my class in high school. I worried until I was junior that I would not get my weight up over 100 pounds before graduation. But in my senior year year I got up to 103-104. When I got into the navy I tipped the scales at a robust 108 lbs.
In 1937 I went to Hospital Corps School and was assigned to the USS NAL Hospital in Pensacola, Fla. I'm not much of a talker and this was a new life for me and being around southern people I had some learning to do. I listened very carefully at the nightly gab sessions as these were older, knowledgeable men. They called Floridan girls from the northwest panhandlle "sand crabs" for the hundreds of sandcrabs you could see on Florida's sandy beaches, All others were called "Piney Girls" as lots of them were from Mississippi and Louisiana. I made several trips with other apprentices and had gained some confidence. So one evening I approached a young lady just like the older guys did.
"Do you want to dance?" says I. She suddenly confronted me with an unsmiling face and blank stare. "You are a Yankee," she said. For a second I was speechless. "Heavens, no", I said "My people were all wheat farmers. The nearest Yankee was 1500 miles away" Still unsmiling, frozen and unbending. I remembered a story I had once read in the Reader's Digest. You asked a Southerner where a Yankee lived and they said "North of the Mason-Dixon Line." You asked those people they would say a Yankee was from New England. You asked a Vermonter you were told a Yankee was from the Green Mountains and ate pie for breakfast. I finished my story triumphantly "I never had a piece of pie in my whole life for breakfast."
Still unsmiling she said, "You talk funny." "I talk funny?" I said. "I talk the same as 90% of the people in this country. If anybody talks funny its you southerners are the ones talking funny." In the silence that followed I knew I had lost. She slowly turned her head and talked to the girl next to her, leaving me to look at the back of her head. It was clear that on this night she was not going to dance with a funny talking, skinny sailor from Kansas. I never found out if she was a "sand crab" or a " piney girl." Crushed, it took a year and a half before I got up enough nerve to again ask another girl to dance. This time on the California coast. Just maybe--just maybe--if she had danced with me, you might have had a sand crab for a grandmother.