EXCERPTS

Rocky Comfort on Sunday

Aside from chicken catching, Decker steadfastly refused to do anything other than loafing as long as he lived. He became legendary in the annals of loafers when he was approached by his sister, Opal Brown, as he sat on the bench in front of Cecil’s store one summer day. She and her husband, Paul, had mowed hay, which was ready to bale and haul in, and it was supposed to rain the next day, which would have damaged or ruined the hay. She desperately needed help in baling and hauling in the hay before it rained. “Would you help?” Opal asked Decker.

“I did not sow that hay, and I will not reap it,” Decker answered firmly.

Wheaton’s Mystery Man

George Alfred Fagan was just a wisp of a man, maybe five foot seven, and no more than 125 pale pounds topped with neatly trimmed gray hair that once had been sandy. Even his blue eyes were pale. But despite his slight build, George always stood out in any crowd of farm families, cattle traders, store clerks, preachers, auctioneers, salesmen, “shade tree” mechanics, and small-town merchants in Wheaton during the 1940s and ’50s. That’s because he was one of only three men in town who always wore a dress shirt, tie, and suit. Often, George also wore a vest, and he topped off his outfit with a crisp straw hat in the summer and a blue or gray fedora in the winter. Once in a while, he substituted a snappy sport coat for the suit and vest.

But George’s fashion trump card was astounding to a young farm boy like me; he occasionally wore spats—white ones, no less.

Listening to the Jar Flies

Usually, even on days when the sun had blazed hotter than Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace—turning the humid air into an Ozark steam bath – a light breeze would begin to stir, and the strong scent of honeysuckle would waft across the backyard from the vines growing on the garden fence east of the house.

None of us had much to say because, as the sun sank, we were entertained by a twilight chorus and light show.

The jar flies were the loudest, providing a powerful, low-pitched grinding song from the maple, locust, and walnut trees around the house. Bullfrogs with their bass croaking, tree frogs and toad frogs with their higher-pitched screeching, and katydids and crickets with their chirping provided the rhythm section of the twilight symphony. But it was always the jar flies that were the most strident, sounding like a bad bass fiddle player sawing a grating note.

Doc McCall – Money and Medicine

I remember crawling up onto a table where the bald, wide-faced physician peered at me, poked and prodded me in whatever parts of my anatomy were ailing, listened to my heart, and then stepped back to stroke his considerable chin while uttering thoughtful sounds – “Yeaaah, um-hum, yeesss”– as he pondered my condition. During that time, my eyes would be drawn to the gold chain that lay across the broad blue-pinstriped vest that covered his ample belly and disappeared into the pocket that held his watch.

The Snake Oil Salesman

Moving quickly, the hypnotist and his partner picked up the tall, now glassy-eyed volunteer, who was stiff as a bois d’arc corner post. Adjusting the chairs to fit his length, they put the lanky man’s heels on top of one of the wooden chair backs and the back of his head on the other. The hypnotized man, face toward the sky, neither grunted nor flinched. There, supported only by his heels and the back of his head, he could have been a log from the Petrified Forest in Arizona.

Then, as we all watched in open-mouthed amazement, the hypnotist’s partner picked up a big flat limestone rock, at least four inches thick and about three feet in diameter, and placed it on the volunteer’s belly. Before I could draw another breath, the hypnotist grabbed a sledge hammer, and with a mighty roundhouse swing, he shattered the rock on the rigid fellow’s belly as the crowd let out a collective gasp.

Wheaton’s Great Banana War

It didn’t take Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio for the word to spread. Faster than you could peel one of Price’s “golden ripe” plantains, Earl heard that the IGA had matched or perhaps undercut his banana price.

Earl did the only thing he could do. He cut his banana price again – whether by one or two cents per pound, no one can remember. The important thing was that after this latest slash in the price of the tropical fruit, Hooten’s was selling bananas for five cents a pound, once again leaving Price Naramore’s new IGA Foodliner as the higher-priced banana store.

For the rest of that Saturday, prices of the yellow fruit were as slippery as, well, a banana peel.

Little Charley and the Unbelievers

Little Charley was thinking big, so one Saturday, as he was feeling full of the Spirit and perhaps also possessed of a certain sense of countrified public relations genius – he draped himself in a white sheet in the manner of the robes Jesus always wore in the pictures on the cardboard fans distributed to churches by local funeral homes. Then he mounted a donkey on his farm near Fairview and headed down Highway 86 for the five-mile ride to Wheaton. I heard that drivers on the two-lane highway slowed, swerved, cussed, and marveled at the strange sight of the modern-day prophet; but somehow Little Charley and his donkey made it to Wheaton, just as Jesus made it to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Of course, there weren’t any palms in Wheaton, and even if there had been, it’s not likely that anyone would have thrown palm fronds in Little Charley’s path as he rode the three blocks of Main Street proclaiming, “Repent, ye sinners, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Oshkosh School with
Mr. Roller and Miz Sampson

One of the tricks of teaching successfully in a one-room school for multiple grades is the ability to keep order in the rest of the room while conducting a class in the front of the room. Mr. Roller was a master of that art, as I found out one day when Jim Taylor and I got into a keep-away fight over a plastic ring. From out of nowhere, a large hand was grasping my hair and yanking me straight up from my desk. On the way to full stand-up position, I glimpsed Mr. Roller’s belt buckle, and I knew we’d been nailed. Then I noticed that his other hand was in firm grasp of Jim Taylor’s hair.

With a handful of hair in each hand, Mr. Roller marched Jim and I to the front of the room where we spent the next thirty minutes standing at attention in front of the blackboard