BUDDY HEMP: It's a counterculture thing. If I say 1970 what comes to mind. For many it is a big question mark. For many more, It was smack dab in the middle of a peace movement. Long hair, beads, peace symbols, new music, and for many, marijuana. Everyone was sick of Vietnam. I had my draft card and was praying that the draft would end before I graduated school. There were some extremist who was ugly to the returning soldiers from Vietnam. Where I live, in a very small town in South Alabama, we were glad when our guys returned home. Most all were treated with smiles and welcome home. Heck, a home boy returning home was reason for a party in his or her honor. Many returned home and continued to smoke pot as a coping mechanism and was thought of as horrible drug addicts. I smoked my first joint in 1970. I loved it. This story is set in this time period and I am very familiar with my thoughts of that time. In the story BUDDY HEMP, there is pot smoking and beer drinking going on but the story is a beautiful picture of Love and Understanding. A picture of a mentally challenged man living with his alcoholic brother. Alcoholics, who find eventually find sobriety. A group of misfits who bond together as a family. Three poor families who go from rags to riches in a forty year span. Excitement, Danger, Close calls, one death, one near death and smoothing out to the peace each had only dreamed of. It will make your heart have a big smile. I laughed so hard when I was writing it. I added many funny things that I have witnessed and also heard told around camp fires. Buddy Hemp, a Vietnam veteran, learns to trust a neighborhood boy who recently lost his dad to cancer. The boy, Joe Fuller, worked at a neighborhood filling station until it closed due to unpaid charge accounts. Joe introduced Buddy to the store owners, Ronnie and Helen Green, and Buddy, using his inheritance, ( His Dads money from making and selling Moonshine) bought the store and kept Joe on to help run it. They soon expanded and opened a tavern on one end of the building. They plant pot and sell it to a dealer in florida, and accumulate enough money to stock the bar and then some. Buddy's old friend which served beside him in vietnam, who incidentally is from a rich drug cartel family, sets him and Joe up with a job which pays extraordinary well. After they discover that they cannot spend their money without being busted by the IRS, They team up with the Greens and start a corporation. Joe, who has a stuttering problem, has the bar named after him. Jah-Jah Joe's Tavern. As they put everything up for collateral, they make it big with their first corporation, sell, start another, sell, start another until, They are multimillionaires. Jah Jah marries his old high school sweetheart, and raises her daughter. It is a barrel full of laughs. They move to the coast on the Florida panhandle. Their favorite thing to do is ride their boats around in the bay, anchor up and watch traffic crossing the beach bridge as they eat boiled shrimp and enjoy beautiful sunsets. Heartwarming is putting it mildly. When you are through reading the book Buddy Hemp, you will pine for the characters. I plan to extend the story, putting it into another book one day. I have another book on the market by the name of TWEAKER. It is a Spiritual fiction and comprised of thirty one short stories of thirty one missions. It is also a good read. I am presently working on my first western by the name of Jessie Reno. I cannot express enough, the good that reading BUDDY HEMP will do for your soul. It is encouraging, has plenty of dangerous episodes, but mostly, it's the various social misfits who grow to love one another as a family and have the best of times playing music, eating, drinking, and smoking Jena specials.