When fiddler Tyrane Percival chokes to death on a chicken bone in a West Virginia barnyard, his young protégé, Eldridge Brewer, takes it pretty hard and feels compelled to bring his old friend peace by burying him next to his long lost love, Leona, in her family plot. Unfortunately, that grave is “a hundred thousand miles” away in Louisiana, so Eldy and Percival's former banjo player, Felton Halladay, hit the road in Halladay's 1959 Studebaker pickup with the fiddler’s corpse iced down in an inflatable kiddie pool in the truck bed and a flatulent dog named Whistler in the cab. But Leona’s uptight brother does not want “that jailbird” anywhere near the family plot and takes steps to prevent it—with hilarious results. This funny, touching story of reconciliation and forgiveness is told with warmth, charm, and a double helping of down-home wisdom.
On Ice is my first book. The story is a fun romp across the south full of hilarious misadventures. Kunati Publishers (VISIT)
I'm a 4th generation Charleston, South Carolina native whose great grandfather served as Mayor in the nineteenth century. In other words, I'm a southerner, as in 'y'all', flat vowels, boiled peanuts and pork barbecue cooked in one side of a 55-gallon drum.
I was educated in the South, up to the College of Charleston when its purpose was to teach young people what to do with their lives. Now I think it just teaches them how to leave a stubble when they shave.
I joined the Chrestomathic Society in college, attracted by a sophomore with a set of bazooms to die for. It didn't work out though; she was attracted to a basketball player destined for the NBLCS, Norman Borman's Lawn Care Service. Today, his pickup trucks are towing a trailer full of lawn mowers with shifty-eyed immigrants without a green card among them riding in the truck bed.
I started writing and got into broadcasting as a disc jockey, the Rocking Redhead. I wore a red shirt and red go-to-hell cap and broadcast from a glass booth in a drive-in restaurant in Tallahassee, Florida.
I outgrew rock and roll or maybe the pressure of car payments, dental appliances, and other adult responsibilities overwhelmed it and I turned to journalism. I anchored the local news on TV and had found a career in which I could truly believe. I had become one of society's barking watchdogs, a responsibility I took very seriously.
TV journalism succumbed to the bean counters and TV news became the shill that it is today, thirty minute magazines with whining anchorpersons. I wanted no part of that. Society's barking watchdogs have become whining Lhasa apso lap dogs who hardly know when to lift their own leg.
On a recent local newscast, the anchorperson breathlessly told her audience what sunscreen to use on the beach. Which one of the five 'W's this 'news report' falls under still escapes me. What's worse is the station won an Edward R Murrow award the year before. If Murrow were alive, he would have shot himself!
Anyway, I put broadcasting behind me to be an advocacy writer and public speaker, sometimes referred to as a lobbyist. I can even claim to have gotten some legislation passed during my turbulent days in the Nation's Capital.
I like babies when they are still dribbling and grin at me when I give them the Bronx cheer. I like women with a sense of humor and who appreciate it when I take gentlemanly actions that seem quaint and even sexist to some. I am opinionated but that is not a fault because all of my opinions are the correct ones, all others must accede to mine.
I am renewed by praise, and crushed by criticism not meant to make me better. I am honored when someone calls me sir, but no less honored when it is unspoken.
This is me and I can't change the facts, stretch them some, but not change them.
