Benjamin G Rader

When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"Ozarkers are not alone in prizing vignettes--nearly everyone likes stories laced with an unexpected and droll sense of humor. A master of this genre was one of Benjamin Rader's great uncles, Jeremiah Benjamin Rader, for whom the author may have been named. As diminutive as his wife was large, it was said that "Jerry" found his own stories so funny that he too often interrupted them by falling into fits of uncontrollable laughter. One such fit cost him dearly; in 1940, a porkchop that he was eating for supper lodged in his windpipe, choking him to death. In addition to serving the day-to-day entertainment needs of Ozarkers, the vignettes in this book, like the one above, offer insight into the Ozarks region, where the author was born in 1935 and lived until 1959. As with archeological sites when unearthed, these stories potentially reveal vivid, if incomplete, details of a culture that are otherwise obscured or unavailable in other sources. These stories challenge the notions that the Ozarks are a homogenous, starkly distinctive region. In some instances, they even reveal qualities of life that are characteristic of rural societies everywhere"--

Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Seitenzahl: 160
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Februar 2024
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 218mm x 157mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 249g
• ISBN-13: 9780252087844
• ISBN-10: 0252087844
• Artikelnr.: 68505800

Autorenporträt

Benjamin G. Rader is James L. Sellers Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His books include Down on Mahans Creek: A History of an Ozarks Neighborhood and Baseball: A History of America’s Game , fourth edition.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. The Clear, Cold Water of Mahans Creek
1. “You’d Better Treat Her Right!”
2. I Was Born in a Veil
3. Learning the Hard Way
4. The Artifacts of Shannon County’s Golden Age
5. Every Child Needs a Grandpa
6. When Uncle Hub Put Down the Great Delaware School Uprising of 1941
7. “Yes, and Alta Won’t Like It Either”
8. The Preacher’s Complaint
9. “Come ’n’ Get It”
10. Family Keepsakes
11. “My ___, She Is Holding a Python!”
12. When I Kissed My Sister
Part II. The People There Even Drank Water from Cisterns
1. The Hilltop of the Dead
2. You Can’t Take the Country Out of the Country Boy
3. Walking to School
4. When Miss Delores Read Us a Novel
5. The Punishment of Curley Pliler
6. When We Danced Naked in the Rain
7. How Harry Caray Punctured Our Innocence
8. “Let There Be Light”
9. An Ozarks Book Burning
Part III. “I Would Choose to Live in Town or beside a County Road”
1. An Ozarks Rite of Passage
2. The Green Beans Were Raw!
3. The Art of Ozarks Bullfighting
4. “Mom, We Shot Old Polly!”
5. The Failure of the Great Multiflora Rose Experiment
6. When Mom Awoke to the Roar of a Chain Saw
7. How Clarence Renfro Failed to Make His Case
8. And Barbara Said That He Looked like Mickey Mantle
9. Thank You, Mr. Fernetti”
10. “I’m from Missouri, and You Have Got to Show Me”
11. “I Must Go to the Eleanor”
12. A Day in the Life of a Jig Builder
Part IV. Are We in the Ozarks Now?
1. “And I Was the Only Sober One in the Group”
2. Barbara Learns about High Finance in the Ozarks
3. I Took Her Hands in Mine
Epilogue: The Ozarks of the American Imagination
Notes