When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes

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

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

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

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