Hillbillies By Michael A. Turner This is a collection of stories about growing up in the Ozarks and the special bond that exists among hill people and their way of life, a place where stories are told, some true and some not so true, with a little B.S. thrown in for good measure. It explains what happens when young cousins, combined in uncontrolled and unsupervised antics, were given unfettered access to heavy farm equipment and various farm animals. It explains how farm kids can entertain themselves using the resources around them with unbridled imagination. These episodes helped relieve the stress of trying to survive with few resources and little money. The book recounts the author's first taste of hillbilly life. The reader joins the author as a young adult living in an old German village where consumption of beer daily was considered a normal way of life. It was just their little way of being social. Many of these bizarre episodes are a result of a little too much sociability. Later, after the author was retired and widowed, his reentry into a new social world was affected still by his hillbilly roots. This book is mostly humorous with a few doses of the harsh reality of county living that rural people will understand and that urban people should know about.
About the Author: To the Northeast of me rising through the cobalt blue of New Mexico skies, I see a hot air balloon drifting along in simple silence above a mountain ridge topped with snow as a backdrop. It is much warmer today than the chilly cold of yesterday. Nothing is ever the same scene from one day to the next from my perspective. I sit quietly in my living room tucked in a modest home, comfortable surroundings, a warm cup of coffee and a view of mountains all around. The air is dry and the desert sand dryer still. I have always wondered about my descriptions of the world around me and from where they originated. What makes them so natural and easy to flow from my fingertips to the keys of a waiting keyboard? I think my Grandmother, on a dairy farm in northern Missouri, played a major role in my way of thinking. She had a diary which was nothing more than a calendar that sat in her dining room on an oak dresser with a large mirror attached. Grandma kept track of the temperature and activities of the day. I was about eleven years old at the time and she encouraged me to write anything in it I wanted. I never really thought of this as being a journal but a journal it certainly was. She always encouraged me to be as descriptive as possible in what I entered. I was so very young and never gave much thought to what Grandma had implanted within me until I started writing after I retired. Writing has become an addiction for me, an obsession beyond obsessions. It is not so much that I like to write or have a desire to write it is that I have to write. I could no more stop writing than a druggie could wean himself off the substance which possesses him. Writing has grabbed my soul and squeezed out my thoughts and feelings I never knew I had. I was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Soon after, my family moved to a farm in Iowa. A great flood wiped us out but early impressions of those days remained and formed the basis of what was to come when the family moved to a little rocky farm in the Missouri Ozarks, a place where bib overalls and boots always commanded more respect than pin stripes or wing-tipped shoes. I was an eye witness and willing participant to all things involving farming, flying, and frequent construction projects: building bridges, roads, commercial properties, and homes. I embraced hillbilly life with a passion. Everything I did in those years has influenced me to this day. My passions now are within the eloquent articulacy of written expression.