I located this book on a used book website after being advised of its existence by my friend, Bill Best, who taught the author, Vernon Abner, when he was a non-traditional student at Berea College after having grown up in Jackson County Kentucky and spending time in the US Navy. Bill Best also wrote the Preface to the book and is listed as the photographer although the book is illustrated with drawings by Jon Howson. The book was published by Kentucke Imprints in Berea, Kentucky, a small privately owned publisher which went defunct upon the death of the owner. The book is small but well worth locating and reading a copy. It is divided into three sections labeled Fiction, Poetry, and Philosophy. The fiction section is composed of six pieces of writing, four of which are clearly short stories and two others which teter somewhere between clearing being fiction and possibly being essays. The true short stories are the best writing in the book and, in and of themselves, make the book worth reading. Two of the stories, "Getting The Spirit" and "Did The Fleas Get To College?" feature a pair of teenage pals in early to middle twentieth century Appalachia who love a good practical joke and are masters at playing those jokes on others. There are moments in both these stories which are laugh out loud hilarious. After reading these stories, I felt I knew the author pretty well. He was born in 1937, about 14 years before me; but, we grew up in the same sort of situations in many ways in rural Eastern Kentucky and it seems that we had the same kind of sense of humor. Both these stories involve the boys efforts to inflict vermin on others who can be said to have been somewhat of authority figures over the boys. That is all I want to say about these stories because I don't want to ruin your fun if you locate a copy of the book. They will have you rolling in the floor just as does the father of one of the boys in the title piece.
The Poetry section is composed of three poems which are readable but not above average. These poems and the entire third section, Philosophy, clearly show that it would have been a wonderful thing if Vernon Abner had been able to attend college directly out of high school and been exposed to a handful of good instructors of literature and writing. Vernon was a highly intelligent, humorous, and caring man who wrote well but his lack of extensive writing experience weakens his work in a manner that would have been eliminated if he had benefited from strong writing instructors in his teens and twenties. Sadly, he also died at only 52 and is buried in his native Jackson County. His memorial on Find A Grave contains an epitaph I have never seen on a tombstone before. It reads simply "It Is Unexplainable". As a regular Find A Grave volunteer contributor, I have entered more than 3,000 memorial on the website, contributed more than 600 photographs of memorials to it, and I have walked through cemeteries in more than 25 states ranging from Pennsylvania to Arizona and Wisconsin to Florida and I have never seen that particular epitaph on a tombstone before. I would love to know the story behind it. The Philosophy section of the book is composed of 19 short essays on a wide ranging set of topic. They are all worth reading; sometimes funny, but never as funny as the short stories; thoughtful; erudite; and many of them make it apparent that the author's knowledge was attained in an old fashioned manner which valued experience far more than education.
If you can ever locate a copy of this book, buy it, read it, preserve it, and pass it on to someone or some institution which will preserve it for future readers and researchers. I have worked in the past for nearly three years in Jackson County Kentucky where Vernon Abner lived most of his life. It is likely that I have met people who knew him but I was never aware of that. I wish I had met Vernon Abner. I know that we could have shared a laugh, a few stories, and maybe even a good supper of squirrels, gravy, fresh peas from the garden, good homemade cat head biscuits, and washed it all down with a glass of cold buttermilk before we started telling more stories and sharing a few belly laughs.
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