by Fred Reed
The Great Custom Lawnmower craze of 1972 caught California unawares. The state is not easily astonished. Still, Mikey Deeter managed it. Mikey lived in Riverside, one of those pseudo-Spanish Levittowns that dangle like beads from the freeways. He was seventeen. He had long blonde hair, a great tan, and the vacant expression one associates with …
You need to know about how in 1962 I was a half-wild country kid of 16 in the wilds of King George Country, Virginia, and drove a derelict ’53 Chevy that shouldn’t even have started but in fact went places that would terrify an armored corps. (You may think you don’t need to know this. …
As part of wokedom’s fantasy-ridden fascination with indigenes, sports teams, such as the Redskins and Braves, race to change names. (For Washington’s team, the Federal Folders has been suggested.) Outraged conservatives see the changes as nauseating prissiness by historically illiterate ninnies. It is every bit of this. Still, the teams should be renamed. What civilized …
It was 1953 in the white newly prosperous suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, just outside the Yankee Capital. I was eight, having been born, like so many of my small compatriots, nine months and fifteen minutes after our fathers got home from the war. These men, my father anyway, had spent years in the Pacific, being …
The other day I went up the holler to talk to Uncle Hant about Democracy. Hant knows everything. Well, nearly about everything. He lives just past the creek in a double-wide with a satellite dish and his old dog Birdshot. You could call him a mountain man. He’s tall and lank, like they made him …
‘Tother day in the afternoon I went down the holler to ask Uncle Hant about this here Eye-rack. One of them blonde gals on TV that looks like they’ve been hit on the head or maybe drank Drano and didn’t have her mind working right, if she had one, was talking about it. I didn’t …
I’m baffled all to flinders. It happens a lot in West Virginia. (Though actually I’m not sure what a flinder is.) Recessive genes cause it. They flock here, like they were swallows and thought Bluefield was Capistrano, and make it hard for us to understand foolishness. Or Europeans. On the lobotomy box the other night …
Maybe I’m just a country boy at heart, and lack sophistication, and don’t see things the way I should. But when I watch one of those radical-feminist women heave onto a podium, like the forehaunches of an under-nourished giraffe but with more hair on her lip, and start hollering and carrying on about what slugs …
As I write, it is Veterans Day. Coincidentally last night, November tenth, the annual Marine Corps birthday party took place at the Tratoria, a local Italian restaurant. I hadn´t gone before, not being much of a joiner, but went this time with Vi and Natalia. The assembled were nice people, well along in years, as …
RSS I peaked early. It happened in tenth-grade English in King George High, in rural King George County, Virginia, in 1962. The teacher had asked us to write the beginning of a short story, which she would read aloud to the class for criticism. I wrote about an Indian fur-trapper named Three Feathers in Quebec …