Sounds like a survey crew to me
Were they cooking cans of sardines on the exhaust manifold, too?
BTW
I absolutely love reading little news items like those. They help put our day to day experiences in the "normal" category. What we watch each evening on the national news is not "normal".
When I was a lad in grade school my mother was the official provider of little news items to two local papers, one daily and one weekly, for our little community. Every Sunday evening she would start calling around to gather the news that had to be turned in by noon on Monday. There was some sort of financial compensation for doing this, but I don't think it was very much.
Standard news items read like: Mr. and Mrs. Hank Hill and Bobby called on Mr. and Mrs. Sheb Wooley and Mike on Tuesday evening. Carol Henderson and Joan Smith spent Saturday in Hillsville, first attending the big homecoming parade and then shopping at the mall. Timmy Jones is now missing both front teeth. The monthly meeting of the Every Other Tuesday Social Club was held on Thursday at Marge Dulavey's house with 12 ladies in attendance. Shelly Dewitt won the door prize, which was a set of Tupperware mixing bowls.
I can recall a time about 35 years ago where a radio DJ in Kansas City would read off such news items at a set time each day. They were taken directly from his hometown weekly newspaper from somewhere deep in the Ozarks. Sometimes you would laugh until you cried.
Sounds like a survey crew to me
Could ya' quit trying to be so technical for once. 🙂
BTW
Holy Cow
You are showing your age, must be reaching geezerville like me.
Was Sheb Wooley just a random thought you pulled out of the air or--
Do you know what western he was a regular on on TV, and what song did he sing?
BTW
Sheb Wooley WAS just a random thought.
That was quite a song he had! I will screw up the words but that dang tune is still stuck in my head. (I turned five in 1958, BTW)
Had to look up the answer to your other question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheb_Wooley
Well I saw the thing comin' out of the sky
It had the one long horn, one big eye
I commenced to shakin' and I said "ooh-eee"
It looks like a purple eater to me
It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
(One-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater)
A one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
Sure looks strange to me (One eye?)
Well he came down to earth and he lit in a tree
I said Mr. Purple People Eater, don't eat me
I heard him say in a voice so gruff
I wouldn't eat you cuz you're so tough
It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
One-eyed, one-horned flyin' purple people eater
One-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
Sure looks strange to me (One horn?)
I said Mr. Purple People Eater, what's your line
He said it's eatin' purple people and it sure is fine
But that's not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock and roll band
Well bless my soul, rock and roll, flyin' purple people eater
Pigeon-toed, undergrowed, flyin' purple people eater
(We wear short shorts)
Flyin' purple people eater
Sure looks strange to me
And then he swung from the tree and he lit on the ground
He started to rock, really rockin' around
It was a crazy ditty with a swingin' tune
Sing a boop boop aboopa lopa lum bam boom
Well bless my soul, rock and roll, flyin' purple people eater
Pigeon-toed, undergrowed, flyin' purple people eater
I like short shorts
Flyin' little people eater
Sure looks strange to me (Purple People?)
And then he went on his way, and then what do ya know
I saw him last night on a TV show
He was blowing it out, a'really knockin' em dead
Playin' rock and roll music through the horn in his head
BTW
Sounds unsettlingly like Prairie View, KS especially with the mention of DeWitts (It's a tiny dutch town in NW Kansas).
BTW
His Bovineness is in SE Kansas.
But the story could be in any small town anywhere. It reminds me very much of the hometown paper in Iowa a few decades ago. The paper is less gossipy now than it used to be, though.
Prairie View, Kansas
Sorry, I was just making up names.....but the theme remains similar in most little towns.
As for Prairie View, I have just missed it many times on Highway 36 while traveling to or from Bird City, which is the current home of Mrs. Cow's father and brother and the location of her high school.
Prairie View, Kansas
yeah, it's not much... just about 100 people left i believe. I've been in that newspaper several times since I was a kid. Mostly because the newspaper lady lived across the street from my grandma and was nosy as heck. Every time we would visit from Norton (20 minutes away) the whole surrounding area needed to know about it... lol
Prairie View, Kansas
Looks like..
..Prairie View.
Use to know some folks in eastern Colorado. Very similar scenery.
Prairie View, Kansas
At 61 I am old enough to remember the days of crank telephones, one and two room country schools and a significant percentage of adults without driver licenses. Many people did not wander very far from home. They didn't know if what they were experiencing was in line with others in the world or not. Many, like my family, did not even own a TV set until the late 1950's. Electric power lines didn't even exist anywhere near many rural homes until the late 1940's or even later. The adults of those decades had survived the Great Depression and WW II and Korea. They understood about doing without and focusing more on survival than anything else. Their entertainment/social world consisted of church and school functions, calling on other families and making rare trips to the big city (3000+ population) maybe once per month. They knew or cared little about the other side of the Earth and what was happening there. What was important was knowing what was happening in their little world, no matter how mundane that seems today.
To some of my classmates I seemed to be a world traveler. We would travel 30 miles to the south regularly to spend time with my widowed grandmother. We would travel either 30 miles to the northwest or to the northeast almost every Saturday in the winter time selling extra square bales of hay and attending the livestock auctions in those towns. Many of my classmates had never been to any of those places. About once each year we would pack up and travel 12 hours west to visit my cousins. One fellow I knew (born about 1926) told me that he had never been more than eight miles from home until after he married. His father had died when he was ten so he dropped out of school to take over the farming and help his mother raise the three younger siblings. Even if all the social programs that exist today had existed at that time, his family would not have applied as they felt there were others in greater need. As you can see, those little bits of "news" were welcomed by those lucky enough to get to read them.
As a student of local history, those local items are a wonderful resource for researching the who, what, when, where and why through the decades.
Prairie View, Kansas
From July into Nov of 1973 I lived in Hoisington KS, just north of Great Bend in
the center of the state. I was 17yrs old and worked as a driller's helper on a seismic exploration crew - worked the whole western 1/2 of the state. I turned
18 on Sept. 24th of that year but had no trouble buying the 3.2% beer prior to my birthday. Had some wild times that summer and saw the most impressive lightning show
somewhere in western Kansas.
For the most part, the people in KS were kind, even though I had hair down to my shoulders back then.
