When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes

Benjamin G Rader

ISBN 10: 0252087844 / ISBN 13: 9780252087844

Published by University Of Illinois Press Feb 2024, 2024

About this Item

Neuware - 'Ozarkers are not alone in prizing vignettes--nearly everyone likes stories laced with an unexpected and droll sense of humor. A master of this genre was one of Benjamin Rader's great uncles, Jeremiah Benjamin Rader, for whom the author may have been named. As diminutive as his wife was large, it was said that 'Jerry' found his own stories so funny that he too often interrupted them by falling into fits of uncontrollable laughter. One such fit cost him dearly; in 1940, a porkchop that he was eating for supper lodged in his windpipe, choking him to death. In addition to serving the day-to-day entertainment needs of Ozarkers, the vignettes in this book, like the one above, offer insight into the Ozarks region, where the author was born in 1935 and lived until 1959. As with archeological sites when unearthed, these stories potentially reveal vivid, if incomplete, details of a culture that are otherwise obscured or unavailable in other sources. These stories challenge the notions that the Ozarks are a homogenous, starkly distinctive region. In some instances, they even reveal qualities of life that are characteristic of rural societies everywhere'--.

Seller Inventory # 9780252087844

Bibliographic Details

• Title: When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes
• Publisher: University Of Illinois Press Feb 2024
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252087844
• ISBN 13: 9780252087844
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu

About this title

Synopsis

People in the Ozarks have long told humorous vignettes that make sense of triumph and tragedy, relay family and local history, and of course entertain. Benjamin G. Rader’s memoir offers a loving portrait of the Ozarks of his youth, where his grandfather midwifed babies and his great uncle Jerry Rader laughed so hard at one of his own stories that he choked to death on a pork chop. As he reveals the Ozarks of the 1930s through 1950s, Rader dispels the myths of the region’s people as isolated and sharing a single set of values and behaviors. He also takes readers inside the life of the extended Rader family and its neighborhoods, each of which drew on storytelling to strengthen resolve in lives roiled by change, economic depression, and the shift of daily life from the country to the city.

An alluring blend of remembering and reflection, When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes provides a vivid portrait of a fading time.

About the Author

Benjamin G. Rader is James L. Sellers Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His books include Down on Mahans Creek: A History of an Ozarks Neighborhood and Baseball: A History of America’s Game, fourth edition.