Category Archives: Books

A Word on Words

In his latest book, author Roy Blount, Jr., puts the English language under the microscope.

November 13, 2008Despite frayed nerves and his fears that flawed voting machines would ruin another presidential contest, author Roy Blount, Jr., was his typical dry, comical self during an Election Day telephone conversation from his Massachusetts home. Having voted at 7:30 a.m., he confessed, “I can’t stand to listen to anybody talk about it anymore. I just want it to be over.” Blount talked about his latest book, Alphabet Juice, which offers amusing ruminations about the origins, meanings, and distinctive sounds of select words. Blount will discuss Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory on November 18, 6:30 p.m., at a charity event hosted by Alabama Booksmith at the Doubletree Hotel.

Black & White: As a Georgian, were you excited when Jimmy Carter was elected president?




Author Roy Blount, Jr., will be signing his new book at a charity event benefitting WBHM. See below for details. (click for larger version)

Roy Blount: Yeah, I was sort of astonished and bemused. I just never expected anybody from Georgia to get elected president. I liked Mo Udall in the primaries. But when Carter got nominated, I was for him. I wrote a book called Crackers, which was largely inspired by my surprise that the leader of the free world was, all of a sudden, a white guy from Georgia. When we were watching the nominating convention, my brother-in-law Gerald, who is from east Texas, jumped up and hollered, “We ain’t trash no more!”

You once compared Democratic presidential candidate and philanderer Gary Hart to former Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom because of Folsom’s habit of kissing women on the campaign trail.

I never met Big Jim Folsom, but I heard a lot of good stories about him. Supposedly, he was at an air show with a bunch of French people. The Alabama National Guard had some kind of trick-flying formation. And all of a sudden a bunch of them ran into each other and exploded. There was an awkward pause and Folsom said, “Well, kiss my ass if that ain’t a show.”

Until I found it in Alphabet Juice, I was not familiar with the word “swive.” [Blount writes: "As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, this was the most common slang term for 'to do it with someone.' It's a good one, too, smoother—might even say more suave—than the F-word."]

“Swive” is a good word, I think. It has a kind of nice force to it. It’s like “swing.” Most of the “sw” words, like “swing and swag and swagger,” are kind of groovy. A word that starts with “f” is often harsh.

You recount film critic Pauline Kael’s review of Reds, where she wrote that Warren Beatty’s character was “pussy-whipped,” and you told her that the New Yorker would never print such a word.

I suggested she change that to “uxorious,” and she just rolled her eyes. [Kael eventually described Beatty's character as "timid."]

Do you recall any particular arguments with editors regarding words you were defending?

I remember I went down to Mansfield, Louisiana, to interview the mother and the football coach of [Major League pitcher] Vida Blue because I was doing a story about him for Sports Illustrated. And I talked to his mother, and then I went and interviewed his old football coach. The coach said, “Well, Vida’s left-handed but if he got in a tight, he could throw with his right.” The editor wanted to change it to: “If he got in a tight ‘spot,’ he could throw with his right.” I said, “No, no, no! It’s got to rhyme!” I finally talked him into it, but he just didn’t see why. [The editor] thought that would be confusing: “Nobody’s going to understand. They would think that we inadvertently left out a word.”

You once wrote: “Rush Limbaugh is like Dom DeLuise trying to do George Wallace.” Have you ever met Limbaugh?

[Laughing] I’d forgotten that, but I’m glad I said it.

No . . . We don’t travel in the same circles. I haven’t listened to Rush in a long time. He reminds me of all these people of my ethnic background that I have, to some extent, justly scorned. In my formative years, I felt embarrassed by all the white Southern men who were holding forth in various mean-spirited and dismissive ways. I realized that I had some kind of connection to that heritage and I needed to just separate myself from it and explain it to some extent and all that. But suddenly, when people like Rush Limbaugh came along, basically saying the same thing—except a little less crudely, I suppose—that really pissed me off.

Do you think Al Franken would make a good senator?

Well, I haven’t been following his race. I know Franken a little bit. It’s strange for a comedian to aspire to be a senator, of course. But [former Republican House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay was an exterminator, wasn’t he? And, I hear, a good one. &

Admission is $35 and includes a signed copy of Alphabet Juice. The evening’s proceeds will benefit WBHM 90.3 radio. The Doubletree Hotel is located at 808 20th Street South; 933-9000.

Free Agent

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Free Agent

Wernher von Braun’s journey from Nazi scientist to U.S. hero.

By Ed Reynolds

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November 01, 2007

Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War

By Michael J. Neufeld




Dr. Wernher von Braun, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, points to a television screen in the Saturn blockhouse at Cape Kennedy on February 16, 1965. The screen showed the Saturn I vehicle carrying the Pegasus satellite into orbit. (click for larger version)

Knopf; 608 pages; $35.

The story of Wernher von Braun (pronounced “brown”) is the curious adventure of a German-turned-American hero who transformed fantasies of outer-space voyage into realities. However, that story is framed by the often blurred boundaries of good and evil. Despised by some as the Nazi engineer primarily responsible for the V-2 rockets that killed 7,000—mostly in London and Antwerp near the end of World War II—von Braun followed whatever route was available to fulfill his childhood aspirations of space flight. He had dreamed of men one day flying to the Moon and finally realized his ambitions with the development of the Saturn V rocket that launched astronauts into lunar orbit in 1968.

Searching for von Braun’s soul, which is embedded in a history haunted by the Third Reich, author Michael Neufeld has penned a brutally honest, in-depth biography. It chronicles the life of a pioneering rocketeer and one-time Nazi SS officer who became an icon by seducing the American public (thanks to Walt Disney) with notions of space exploration.

Von Braun’s harshest critics insist that he was guilty of war crimes, not only for his primary role in creating the V-2 ballistic missile that intimidated Europe but also because he used prisoners of war laboring in deplorable conditions to build the weapons. More than 20,000 POWs enslaved indirectly under von Braun died at the Mittelwerk rocket facility and its Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. The underground rocket factory where prisoners lived and worked was a maze of cold, damp, and poorly lit tunnels infested with excrement, lice, and fleas. Prisoners wore rags, and toilets were large metal oil drums cut in half and never cleaned. Disease and malnourishment were rampant, and POWs dropped dead at a rate of 20 per day.

To his defenders, von Braun is a victim of Adolf Hitler’s oppressive authority, a serf of sorts who had no options other than to bow to the Führer’s commands. According to Neufeld, von Braun’s own words in a 1950 New Yorker profile reveal the engineer’s mercenary nature. One afternoon, during a gathering of his amateur rocket club in the early 1930s, a black sedan drove up carrying three German military personnel who made von Braun’s group an offer they could not refuse. Von Braun recalls: “They were in mufti [civilian clothes], but mufti or not, it was the Army . . . That was the beginning. The Versailles Treaty [which disarmed Germany after World War I] hadn’t placed any restrictions on rockets, and the Army was desperate to get back on its feet. We didn’t care much about that, one way or the other, but we needed money, and the Army seemed willing to help us. In 1932, the idea of war seemed to us an absurdity. The Nazis weren’t yet in power. We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”

Von Braun claimed no knowledge of the Nazi extermination of Jews. In the 1960s, he told his good friend, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), “I never knew what was happening in the concentration camps. But I suspected it, and in my position I could have found out. I didn’t and I despise myself for it.” Commenting on the confession to Clarke, Neufeld is skeptical about von Braun’s defense: “Knowing what we know now about his direct encounter with SS prisoners starting in mid-1943, the first sentence of his statement could be interpreted as a bald-faced lie.” Quoting historian Ian Kershaw, Neufeld adds, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but was paved with indifference.”

In his sworn affidavit to the U.S. Army in 1947, von Braun said that he was forced to join the National Socialist Party in 1939. In actuality, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, though he was no doubt pressured to do so.

Later in life, von Braun often bolstered his claim that he was not a true Nazi by telling of his and a few associates’ arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. The rocket engineer was a “heavy social drinker.” One night he and his intoxicated comrades had talked loudly at a party about the war not going well, wishing that their rocket development could be used to build spaceships instead of weapons. They were arrested within days. Problems that delayed final production of the V-2 had prompted speculation that perhaps von Braun had actually been arrested for suspected sabotage. There was even some talk that he and the others might be executed. They were freed after a couple of weeks, because Hitler desperately needed them to finish the V-2. Von Braun knew he had to produce a successful rocket quickly or else, which forced him to place an order for more POW slave labor at the Mittelwerk. (Peenemünde had been the first principal rocket factory before it was bombed by the British in 1943.)

During his surrender to U.S. Allies in 1945, von Braun exhibited the same charisma, self-confidence, and luminary quality that would later charm the American public. He and his fellow engineers were hiding out in a ski resort in the mountains on the German-Austrian border at war’s end, trying to decide what to do. Two days after Hitler’s suicide, they drove to an Allied-occupied Austrian town to turn themselves in, where von Braun boasted to his captors that he was the “founder and guiding spirit” of the Peenemünde rocket facility, all the while acting like a dignitary.

“One member of the 44th [Infantry Division, to which von Braun surrendered] later said that ‘[von Braun] treated our soldiers with the affable condescension of a visiting congressman,’” writes Neufeld, adding that von Braun posed “for endless pictures with individual GIs, in which he beamed, shook hands, pointed inquiringly at [American soldiers’] medals and otherwise conducted himself as a celebrity rather than a prisoner.” Von Braun even bragged to a reporter for the Beachhead News “that if he had been given two more years, the V-2 bomb he invented could have won the war for Germany.”

• • •In America, von Braun soon became frustrated that he could not interest the U.S. government in space travel. His purpose in being brought to the United States was to develop missiles as weapons. Von Braun decided he would have to personally get the American public excited about space flight, prompting him to write a novel called Mars Project that he tried to get published in 1950. The book was rejected by 18 publishing companies because it was too technical and featured little storyline. One publisher said that all the novel was good for was to “build a rocket ship.” Eventually, a publisher in West Germany became interested after it was rewritten as a drama by a former Nazi propaganda writer.

The publication of space exploration articles in the early 1950s by von Braun for Collier’s magazine (illustrated with futuristic renderings of rockets) caught the public’s attention. This led Walt Disney to ask von Braun in 1954 to appear on Disney’s ABC network television show “Man in Space.” The rocketeer’s narration of a segment in 1955 was the first time that America heard his voice. Von Braun and a couple of German rocket engineers were prominently featured in the series, but the show’s producers questioned if it was wise for the program to be dominated by German accents. “The Disney crew had in fact discussed whether it was a problem that all three experts were German. But their very accents fit an American cliché of scientific gravity, and as for the Nazi issue, Walt Disney was the quintessential conservative, Midwestern middle American and seems to have given it little thought.”

One month after the first broadcast of “Man in Space,” von Braun legally became an American citizen in Birmingham, along with a hundred of his German colleagues and their spouses. Von Braun told the press gathered for the occasion, “This is the happiest and most significant day of my life . . . Somehow we sensed that the secret of rocketry should only get into the hands of people who read the Bible.” However, to his parents he reported, “It was a terrible circus, with film crews, television, press people and the usual misquotations.”

Profiles in Time and the West German equivalent Der Spiegel did not mention von Braun’s Nazi party membership. Reporters did not have a clue. Instead, a film about his life that von Braun agreed to participate in began the unraveling of his past. I Aim at the Stars began filming in 1959. Von Braun was paid $24,000, and Columbia Pictures kicked in another $25,000 plus 7% of the net profits. With his newfound wealth, he traded in his American car for a Mercedes-Benz. The movie was initially predicated on the image of von Braun as “a space dreamer persecuted by the Nazis and given a second chance by the United States,” though the script was later changed to portray him more accurately as striking a Faustian bargain to go into space. Still, the film was considered a whitewash job. Ironically, the screenwriter was a 1933 refugee from the Nazis who introduced fiction into the script to make the story palatable for an American audience.

At the Munich premier of the film, three unarmed tactical nuclear missiles were on display in front of the theater. U.S. military brass attended in full uniform. Ban-the-bomb demonstrators were also on hand. At a press conference, von Braun answered British critics of his American success: “I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides . . . A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war.” The film was panned and poorly attended. Antwerp, which suffered more V-2 rocket hits than London, banned the movie. Comic Mort Sahl coined the greatest putdown of von Braun’s career when he quipped that I Aim at the Stars should have been subtitled But Sometimes I Hit London.

A year after NASA was created, in 1958, von Braun was appointed chief of the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, and was no longer working for the army. Pressure was applied by NASA on von Braun to hire more black engineers and technicians, but many were reluctant to move to Alabama at that time. Von Braun did not appear eager to get involved when Governor George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door to prevent a black student from registering at the University of Alabama, yet he publicly condemned segregation when a black MSFC employee enrolled without incident at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Not long afterward, Governor Wallace visited MSFC and witnessed a rocket test. Von Braun addressed an audience that included the governor, and stressed that it was imperative that Alabama move on from its segregationist past. After the speech, he chatted with Wallace and asked the governor if he wanted to be the first person on the Moon. Wallace replied, “Well, better not. You fellows might not bring me back.” &

Still Southern After All These Years

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Still Southern After All These Years

By Ed Reynolds

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May 31, 2007

Roy Blount, Jr.’s essays and books of wry observations slice reality into more amusingly diverse shapes than a Ronco Veg-O-Matic. When not defending his fellow Southerners (Blount grew up in Georgia), he turns that much-maligned chunk of America known as the Deep South into a cultural punching bag for the amusement of Yankees everywhere, even while launching hilarious tirades against the North for its ignorance concerning Dixie.

Currently heard on National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” Blount first achieved notoriety when he followed the Pittsburgh Steelers for almost a year to write the book Three Bricks Shy of a Load in 1974. Periodically, his barbed-wire embrace of the South gets him wrongly lumped in with Lewis Grizzard, the late redneck humorist who harvested acres of corn-pone jokes, apparently willed to comedian Jeff Foxworthy. Blount writes, “I have been referred to as ‘the thinking man’s Lewis Grizzard’—a description that nearly eliminates every possible market.” Blount adds that Grizzard’s best-selling humor books are “to Southern humor as foot-long pecan rolls are to Southern cuisine.”

In his latest book, Blount recalls the arrival of Krispy Kreme donuts in New York City several years ago: “At a grocery store on the Upper West Side called Gourmet Garage, I came upon a tray full of cold Krispy Kremes for sale beneath a sign that said FRESH FROM THE ANTE-BELLUM SOUTH. ‘Well, now,’ I said to the man behind the counter. ‘They can’t be any too fresh . . . I mean, if they date back to circa 1859.’”




“I did a story about Willie Nelson for Esquire some years ago, and had a couple of hits of his weed. I don’t know how he functions on that stuff.” (click for larger version)

Blount will give a lecture and sign copies of his latest book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South at the McWane Center at 6:30 p.m. on June 12. The event will benefit 90.3 WBHM. Call 870-4242 for details.

Black & White: When I was younger, Southern stereotypes, as portrayed in Hollywood or books, sort of bothered me. Now that I’m older, I get a perverse pleasure out of insulting perceptions of the South.

“The Beverly Hillbillies” always sort of bothered me. But I always enjoyed “Hee Haw”—well, not every minute of it. There’s a piece in my book about the difference between Nashville, which is supposed to be a great movie, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, even though there are all sorts of broad stereotypes, because it seemed to be appreciative. And also the music was really good. Whereas in Nashville, the music was written by the damn actors, and Robert Altman didn’t seem to care anything about what Nashville was really like.

Any thoughts on the Confederate flag?

I get a lot of questions about the Confederate flag. It’s crazy to have a flag that divides people of the region along racial lines. So I suggested a new Southern flag that would be half green for “money” and half blue for “the blues.” And sort of a dark brown male-looking hand and a tan male-looking hand, and the same thing with (two) female hands, and they would all be doing what flags do, which is wave. And the slogan underneath would be “Just fine. And you?” It would be a lot friendlier flag.

What’s your opinion of Don Imus?

I didn’t like Don Imus. I was not sorry to see him go. I never did appear on his show. He always just seemed, to me, to be pushing the envelope to no good end . . . I used to drive my kids to school and we used to listen to him, and none of us liked him. It seemed to me he was trying to be cooler than he was. And you just don’t say “Nappy-headed ho’s.” I wouldn’t say it in private, much less on the radio . . . or say it by accident (laughs).

How did you come to follow the Pittsburgh Steelers for Three Bricks Shy of a Load?

I was working at Sports Illustrated and one day the managing editor summoned me to the bar where a bunch of [writers and editors] would sit around at lunchtime—and after work—and drink. And they came up with the notion that somebody on the staff should spend a year with a football team and write a book . . . I had just gotten divorced and I was sort of at loose ends and I had covered the [Pittsburgh] Pirates a lot, and, also, I had done a story about the Rooney family, who owned the Steelers. [Sports Illustrated] wanted me to do the L.A. Rams or the Jets or some famous team, but I had the sense that Pittsburgh would be the place to go. So I said I’d do it if I could do it in Pittsburgh.

What was your reception like among the players?

I think it was better than it would have been in L.A. or New York, because the Steelers hadn’t been covered all that much at that time. This was the 1973 season . . . I really had that team nailed. I knew everybody on the team and the hangers-on and the coaches and scouts. It was a great way to see a cross-section of American life.

I read you were unhappy when introduced once at a humor-writing seminar as “the world’s most sophisticated redneck.”

I don’t think people ought to throw around the word “redneck” the way they do. People from the North don’t seem to realize that there is anything potentially insulting about it. If I were more of a redneck, it would be one thing, but I don’t even have a dog. I’d like to have one. I have had many dogs, but at the moment I don’t have one . . . The “introducer” didn’t know what a redneck was . . . And I’m not all that sophisticated. It was condescending without realizing it was condescending. The taxonomy was all screwed up (laughs).

Was Lewis Grizzard a sophisticated redneck?

Well, he did cocaine and wore loafers without any socks (laughs). In those two respects, he was more sophisticated than I.

Do you still eat Krispy Kreme donuts?

I remember loving them, and I will eat one occasionally. I used to eat half a dozen. Now I think I would die if I ate three. But I nostalgically eat one every now and then. I still think they’re a lot better than Dunkin’ Donuts. At least when they’re hot. I was disillusioned when I was bringing my wife to taste a hot Krispy Kreme for the first time. And the “Hot Now” sign was blinking at this Krispy Kreme store [in New York City]. I went in and they weren’t hot. I said, “You got you’re ‘Hot Now’ light blinking.” And he said, “Well, the manager said to keep that blinking all the time.” And it just broke my heart. You can’t do that.

Chef Frank Stitt was on “The Martha Stewart Show” a few weeks ago to prepare some sort of typical Southern dish, and when he ladled out the grits, the studio audience started applauding.

I don’t know why people think grits are unusual. I do like grits, and you can get grits in New York at some places, not just fancy places. Grits are such a great absorptive substance. The yellow of the eggs and red-eye gravy and stuff. I remember Jerry Clower talking about being served Irish potatoes for breakfast. Explaining grits is sort of like asking an Irishman to explain “potato.” They’re just grits.

I doubt if the marijuana was a surprise to anybody, but how about Willie Nelson also being charged with possession of psilocybin mushrooms a few months ago?

I did a story about Willie for Esquire some years ago, and had a couple of hits of his weed. I don’t know how he functions on that stuff. But he’s always been pretty open about that. Mushrooms? Shit, I’m too old to do stuff like that. But then again, if Willie wants to do psilocybin mushrooms, who am I to tell him no? &

One Giant Leap

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By Ed Reynolds

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June 15, 2006

First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong

By James R. Hansen

Simon and Schuster, 784 pages, $30

For 35 years, astronaut Neil Armstrong shunned those seeking his thoughts about his adventures as the first man on the moon. While other astronauts wrote of their own harrowing moments in space exploration, Armstrong kept his story to himself, as if he could put the genie back into the bottle and elude history. One of only 30 astronauts chosen to fulfill President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, Armstrong saw his role as more practical than iconic. He’s been quoted as saying that he hopes to be remembered as the first engineer on the moon, not the first “spaceman.”




	(click for larger version)

Auburn University professor and former NASA historian James R. Hansen convinced Armstrong to tell his story in First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. Hansen’s attention to technical aspects—and his knack for making them accessible even to novices—reportedly convinced Armstrong to cooperate. Despite the inclusion of launch trajectories and a jumble of acronyms, Hansen tells a compelling, and often riveting, story that reads like Jules Verne recounting the history of NASA’s lunar reach.

When JFK initiated the moon-flight project, NASA had three different methods under serious consideration. The first was called “Direct Ascent,” an improbable plan which required that a rocket called the Nova, approximately the size of the Empire State Building, be launched to the moon. The remaining rocket stage that would be in lunar orbit before touching down would be as tall as the Washington Monument. If the sheer size of the spacecraft were not cumbersome enough, another problem was how to get the crew down to the surface of the moon from such heights. Direct Ascent was quickly dismissed.

Dr. Wernher von Braun advocated a second procedure called Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR). Astronauts would be launched in a rocket separately from the main missile. The spaceships would dock while orbiting Earth and then proceed to the moon. Being much smaller than the Nova, the EOR rocket made return launch more feasible. EOR also included construction of a space station for future lunar missions.




Deployment of the U.S. flag by Armstrong and Aldrin was caught by a sixteen-millimeter film camera in the lunar module. (click for larger version)

To the surprise of many, NASA chose a third option: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR). Critics said it was too risky for rendezvous to occur in lunar orbit 240,000 miles away from Earth. A rescue would be impossible in the event of an accident. Hansen sums up the cold reality of such a disaster and how it affected the decision-making process: “The specter of dead astronauts sailing around the moon haunted those who were responsible for the Apollo program and made objective evaluation of its merits unusually difficult.” However, LOR required less fuel, and the necessary craft weighed half that of an EOR rocket. Besides, LOR was the only method that could meet JFK’s dream before 1970. “LOR saves two years and two billion dollars,” Armstrong wryly observed.

Armstrong’s close calls are legendary. During the Korean War, he lost eight feet from his wing when his jet clipped the ground on a mission. Armstrong climbed immediately back to 14,000 feet and bailed out. He wrestled control of Gemini VIII as the spaceship was tumbling and spinning in space. When Armstrong manually took control of the lunar module the Eagle upon descent to the moon and steered the craft to a less treacherous landing area with only seconds of fuel remaining, Buck Rogers had indeed become a reality. Armstrong’s unassuming, calm demeanor amazed his peers. Astronaut Alan Bean never forgot his first encounter with that nonchalance after one of Armstrong’s brushes with death. Armstrong was flying the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), a high-risk, wingless contraption that used thruster rockets to propel the craft and was flown at a minimum altitude of 500 feet to ensure proper training procedures. The LLTV began to sway, slowly turning at an angle, out of control.

Hansen writes: “A ground controller radioed Neil to bail out. He activated the ejection seat with only a fractional second of margin. Neil’s parachute opened just before he hit the ground. He wasn’t hurt, but the LLTV was demolished in a fireball.”




Professor Armstrong teaching engineering at the University of Cincinnati in 1974. (click for larger version)

Armstrong immediately returned to the office that he shared with Bean after the mishap. Bean had overheard others discussing the incident, though Armstrong had failed to mention it. “I go back in the office,” Bean explains. “Neil looked up, and I said, ‘I just heard the funniest story!’ Neil said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I heard you bailed out of the LLTV an hour ago.’ He thought a second and said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘I lost control and had to bail out of the darn thing.’”

Amazingly, NASA never lost an astronaut in orbit in the pre-space shuttle years. First Man recounts the tragedy of the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire, which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White. Oddly enough, White lived next door to Armstrong and had helped Neil save his house from a blaze only a year earlier. The Apollo 1 disaster forced NASA to rethink the Apollo space capsule at the insistence of the astronaut corps. The fiery explosion that killed Grissom and the others occurred during a routine ground test in a pure oxygen environment. A spark ignited the cabin instantly. NASA learned from the setback, and from then on, all ground-testing was done in an environment that was 60 percent oxygen and 40 percent nitrogen.

A disconcerting aspect of First Man is Buzz Aldrin’s drama and bitterness in his lobbying to be the first man to step onto the moon. Armstrong reveals for the first time that he had the option of replacing Aldrin as pilot with Jim Lovell, but Armstrong felt that Lovell deserved to command his own Apollo mission (Apollo 13). He stuck with Aldrin, though a soap opera soon developed. Aldrin’s argument had been that the commander always stayed with the spacecraft while the pilot performed spacewalks. Veteran astronaut Gene Cernan recalls:

“Buzz had worked himself into a frenzy” about who would step onto the moon first. He came flapping into my office at the Manned Spacecraft Center one day like an angry stork, laden with charts and graphs and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious—that he, the lunar module pilot, and not Neil, should be the first down the ladder on Apollo 11 . . . How Neil put up with such nonsense for so long before ordering Buzz to stop making a fool of himself is beyond me.”

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Armstrong says he didn’t give much thought to who would be first out of the lunar module. Flight Director Chris Kraft shed some light: “Look, we just knew damn well that the first guy on the moon was going to be a Lindbergh . . . It should be Neil Armstrong . . . Neil is Neil. Calm, quiet, and absolute confidence. We all knew he was the Lindbergh type. He had no ego.” Thus, NASA changed the normal procedure that the commander always stayed with the spacecraft. “[Neil] was the commander, and perhaps it should always have been the commander’s assignment to go first onto the moon,” said Kraft.

For his part, Armstrong took everything in stride without a hint of romanticism. Searching for a quote that would reveal Armstrong’s true thoughts, historian Douglas Brinkley once asked Neil, “As the day clock was ticking for takeoff, would you every night, or most nights, just go out quietly and look at the moon? I mean, did it become something like “‘my goodness?’” To which Neil responded, “No, I never did that.” &

Weight of the Wind

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Weight of the Wind

One man’s experience floating more than half a mile above the earth in a “paper” airplane.

By Ed Reynolds

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June 01, 2006

After climbing out of a dilapidated Oldsmobile ’98 Regency, sailplane pilot Tim Lockert surveys the sky for white cumulus clouds. “You know how to tell a glider pilot?” he asks. “They’re the ones with sunburned Adam’s apples.” The Regency is the official glider tow car. The car’s roof has been sawed off, the trunk lid is missing, and the words “Sylacauga Soaring Society” are painted in black on the green door. The front passenger seat has been realigned to face the rear. The battered Oldsmobile, referred to as The Rocket, is used to tow 700-pound gliders to a grass field that parallels the runway at Sylacauga Municipal Airport. The Sylacauga Soaring Society has been in existence for two years, and as many as a half-dozen members gather each weekend to be launched skyward aboard glider planes towed by cropdusters.

At 2,800 feet, the gliders are cut loose to sail like hawks in search of winds that provide enough lift to transport them as far as 60 miles east to Clanton. Sylacauga is an Indian word for “buzzards roost,” a term somewhat explained as the pilots scrutinize the sky for buzzards gliding in circles. This indicates an ideal spot for sailplanes to snag highly coveted thermal wind lifts. “Buzzards are lazy birds,” explains Lockert. “Where they glide is always a good spot.”

I swallow in fear when I first stand next to the tiny sailplane. On the ground, the silver glider leans at an angle, supported by the tip of one wing. The plane is only 10 inches off the ground. It’s a very sexy, sleek aircraft, though intimidating. The pilot’s compartment is smaller than the width of a canoe but flanked by a 55-foot wingspan. “I’m not trying to get friendly with you,” jokes Paul Golden as he connects a harness strapped across my crotch and shoulders. “How tight do you want it? We got two ways to fasten you in: open casket or closed casket.” With those words of reassurance, he lowers the plexiglass canopy.




“How tight do you want it? We got two ways to fasten you in: open casket or closed casket.” (click for larger version)

The Pawnee single-engine cropduster, to which the glider is tethered for takeoff, cranks to life while we sit silent except for vocal checks from pilot Lockert, seated behind me. “It’s nothing but a ski rope,” laughs Lockert as the yellow rope stretches taut, and we roll across the grass field at 40 mph balanced on a single 10-inch-diameter wheel under the center of the glider. Suddenly we’re airborne, and I really don’t want to be. My stomach tightens. At 100 feet, I start feeling queasy. My hands sweat profusely as I search for anything to hold onto.

There’s nothing to grip, so I venture from pressing on the inner walls of the cockpit to scribbling often unintelligible notes on a pad. One panicky note reads, “Hope I die on impact if we fall from the sky.” Carnival rides terrify me. I’m prone to panic attacks when strapped in, and the panic escalates once everything starts moving. This glider ride is a roller coaster without rails, and I want off immediately.

The sailplane, still attached to the cropduster, bobs in the wind. “You always worry about the tow rope breaking,” warns Lockert. And if it does break? “Say your prayers,” he laughs. “I don’t want to have to think at that point. Just react. If we’re at 200 feet and the rope snaps, I turn around.” Otherwise, he scouts for a place to land pretty quickly. “Straight ahead, straight ahead, straight ahead,” repeats Lockert, until he says, “Turn around.” He explains, “Even though I’ve been doing this for 25 years, whenever I launch, I verbally repeat, ‘Straight ahead.’ Then I say, ‘Turn around.’ The point is that I’m calling out to myself that in the event the tow rope breaks, I’m just going to go straight ahead and land it. And what you don’t want to do when the tow rope breaks is think. You want to react immediately. So it’s really part of the training to learn that every time you take off, call out: ‘Straight ahead, straight ahead, straight ahead.’ If the rope breaks you’ll know immediately what to do
. . . Once you get to 200 feet, you’re going to turn around, and you’ll just land right where you took off.”

At 2,800 feet, I’m a nervous wreck as I anticipate the inevitable loss of power. Suddenly, the glider jolts slightly. With a loud snapping noise, the tow rope disengages from the glider and flaps like a useless kite tail still attached to the disappearing cropduster. It’s a weird feeling. We’re on our own, yet the 900-pound aluminum plane (a single-seater plane weighs 700 pounds) with no engine immediately climbs to 3,200 feet. I am essentially floating more than half a mile above the earth in a paper airplane with a rudder. All that can be heard is the rushing of the wind around me.

When I ask Lockert to define “pitch,” he laughs and demonstrates it instead. “That’s the one that puts your heart in your throat.” The pilot applies pitch with a wicked cackle, and the plane dips and increases speed. My insides float for brief seconds somewhere above my head. “What pitch does, is it’s going to cause the nose of the airplane to point down or point up,” he says. “Because of the way the airfoil is shaped, if I point the nose of the airplane down, I’m going to go faster. If I point the nose up, I go slower.” The plane reaches speeds of 70 mph. “When you’re in control, the pitch is not as startling ‘cause you know what’s coming,” says Lockert.




Sylacauga Soaring Society president Tim Lockert straps himself into an LP-15 sailplane. (click for larger version)

He points to various ground landmarks of particular interest to a glider pilot. “When you’re down low, you don’t need to be looking for the clouds, you need to be looking at the sources for the hot air that is going to make a cloud. And typically that’s an area that is dry and dark, wherever the sun heats up the earth. Gliding is essentially solar-powered flight. The Wal-Mart parking lot is a great bet. Home Depot over there. The marble quarry is a good spot. Particularly in our area of the country you’ll find these areas of forests that have been harvested. What’s left has died, so it becomes this dark brown covering over the ground. So when the sun hits that, boy, it has great opportunity to heat the air. So cleared areas of forests are just great [for thermal lift].”

Unfortunately, excessive winds result in too much turbulence for an ideal flight afternoon, and we are aloft for only half an hour. “It’s a wrestling match out here today,” Lockert says. Turbulence prevents us from picking up good thermals. Lockert believes that under proper conditions, he could glide from Sylacauga to the Gulf Coast. The current gliding record is a flight from Chattanooga to Pennsylvania and back, continuing over the Smoky Mountains to a landing in South Carolina. The pilot used the Smoky Mountains as a thermal source, particularly in the afternoon when the sun heated the mountain range.

The small size of the plane immediately returns to mind as we approach the ground. “I’m going to put it in that grass strip down there,” says Lockert as we quickly approach earth at what seems a steep angle. I can’t stop thinking about how small the wheels are. Convinced that we’re doomed to crash nose-first into the earth, I brace myself for impact. Instead, the sailplane touches down with surprising ease at 40 mph, rolling to a stop in less than the length of a football field. I later watch Lockert take off and land the single-seat glider. Standing a couple of hundred feet away when he returns, I marvel at the graceful combination of physics and machinery. The sailplane is a mere 10 inches off the ground when its wheels touch down.

The Sylacauga Soaring Society currently offers a monthly membership for $99, including ground instruction and a half-hour flight. Call 205-807-0666 or visit www.sylacaugasoaring.com for more information.

Dead Folks 2006 (Part 7)

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Dead Folks 2006 (Part 7)

A look back at the notable names and personalities who called it quits last year.

By Paul Brantley, David Pelfrey, Ed Reynolds, J.R. Taylor

January 26, 2006 Authors/Illustrators




Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

What was the difference between the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials? There weren’t any witches in Salem. Ignore that, though, and maybe you can find some meaning in “The Crucible” and the other writings of Arthur Miller. He hadn’t written a successful play since 1968, but Miller’s passing was still celebrated as an important event. This wasn’t because he was an important playwright. It’s because all of today’s good leftist playwrights have to celebrate Miller for bringing his absurd politics into high schools all over America. Fellow playwright Harold Pinter even tried to pretend that Miller was some kind of blacklisted figure.

Miller’s own leftist contemporaries, unsurprisingly, never considered him to be of much importance. “Death of a Salesman” wasn’t bad, but it still can’t compete with anything by Rod Serling or Paddy Chayefsky. At least Miller could proudly claim to have married Marilyn Monroe—but that achievement was pretty much ruined in the wake of “After the Fall,” a stage chronicling the marriage that was a pioneering masterpiece in midlife self-absorption. It helps to bear in mind that Bebe Buell once attributed her lust for Elvis Costello to “Arthur Miller Syndrome.” His final play would be yet another rehashing of having sex with Marilyn, so at least Miller had an understanding of his ultimate place in pop culture. –J.R. Taylor

Stan Berenstain

Plenty of parents and former children became very nostalgic when Stan Berenstain passed away. His wife Jan had been his partner in almost 40 years of Berenstain Bears books, as the clan’s illustrated adventures showed kids how to clean around the house and get ready for trips to the dentist—along with weirder stuff, as the Berenstains began to address issues such as drug abuse over the decades. The Berenstain Bears also made the inevitable transition to animated adventures and a bigger world of merchandising. However, all of this was pretty baffling to kids who’d first stumbled across the Berenstains’ hilarious early work as chroniclers of suburban angst. Racy paperback collections such as Baby Makes Four suggest that they could have been Erma Bombeck for those parents who’d just missed living by the Playboy Philosophy. —J.R.T.

Ed McBain

Fans of detective novels and mysteries are familiar with the 50-odd novels in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series. Fans of Hill Street Blues, Law & Order, Homicide, Police Story, and dozens of other television detective series are indirectly acquainted with McBain; his novels were the blueprints for a now well-established genre—the ensemble detective story. Ed McBain is a pseudonym, among others, for Evan Hunter, an amazingly successful mystery writer whose first novel was the controversial Blackboard Jungle. Based on Hunter’s experiences teaching at a vocational school in a rough urban environment, the book was adapted for a sensational motion picture starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. His screenplays for the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” television series led to Hunter’s screenplay for Hitchcock’s The Birds. —David Pelfrey

Frank Kelly Freas

Anyone who so much as passed by a bookstore or newsstand in the last 50 years has seen an illustration by Kelly Freas. That’s his work on the covers of countless Ballantine, Avon, Signet, or DAW publications. From 1957 to 1962 Freas drew many of those hilarious, but amazingly realistic, fake ads for MAD Magazine, and provided Alfred E. Neumann’s moronic visage for their covers. Freas’ regular gig was creating otherworldly illustrations for works by such science-fiction legends as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. The insanely prolific Freas earned 10 Hugo Awards for his work in the science fiction and fantasy field. He did real science, too; his illustrations for NASA missions hang in the Smithsonian. The cover illustration for the October, 1953, issue of Astounding Science Fiction (for whom Freas worked for 50 years) depicts a very troubled and puzzled giant robot holding a mortally wounded human in his hand. This legendary image became the album cover art for Queen’s News of the World. –D.P.

Inventors/Pioneers

Leo Sternbach

In the 1950s, pharmaceutical prospects for relieving anxiety were few: Barbiturates were highly addictive and easily overdosed on; “major tranquilizers” such as Thorazine had emptied mental hospitals but were instruments too blunt for everyday anxiety; and the only “minor tranquilizer,” Miltown, was weak in regular doses and toxic in high ones. What was needed was a drug that relieved anxiety safely and without overt sedation.

Austrian-born Jewish chemist Leo Sternbach, working with a couple of other chemists at Hoffman-La Roche Labs, serendipitously concocted just such a substance in the compound chlordiazepoxide, marketed under the name Librium in 1960. Librium was the first benzodiazepine, but its more potent successor, Valium, would change the face of American culture. It ultimately proved to be addictive, but Valium’s ability to take the edge off of daily stresses with surgical precision, plus its relative safety (you’d have a hard time killing yourself with Valium alone) made it the most-prescribed drug from 1969 to 1982. It was even immortalized in The Rolling Stones’ hit “Mother’s Little Helper.” Such a level of popularity can probably be explained in part by the fact that, for some, it was a readily concealable alternative to alcohol abuse. Sternbach also invented the drugs Dalmane, Mogadon, and Klonopin. –Paul Brantley

Robert Kearns

Robert Kearns invented intermittent windshield wipers, which allowed pauses between swipes during light rain. Ford and Chrysler implemented Kearns’ idea, and Kearns, often acting as his own attorney, successfully sued the automobile corporations in 1978 and 1982, respectively, for nearly $20 million. He had previously shopped the idea to automakers but could never reach a licensing deal. Lawsuits against General Motors and foreign automakers were dismissed. Kearns died of cancer at 77. —Ed Reynolds

Charlie Muse

Half a century ago, baseball players were real men who didn’t bother with helmets when batting. In 1952, a Pittsburgh Pirates executive named Charlie Muse forced his team to wear batting helmets despite taunts from opponents that the Pirates were “sissy.” Slowly, opposing teams began to adapt, and in 1954 the Braves’ Joe Adcock credited the helmet with saving his life after being knocked unconscious while batting against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The next day, the Dodgers began wearing helmets. —E.R.

George Mikan

The first “big man” to dominate the game of basketball, the 6-foot, 10-inch Mikan would simply stand beneath the basketball goal of opponents and swat their shots out of the rim. Mikan’s advantage forced the sport to outlaw “goaltending,” where a ball is deflected away once it begins its downward trajectory to the basketball goal. —E.R.

John Ebstein




	George Mikan (click for larger version)

In 1962 John Ebstein created the first airbrushed rendering of Studebaker’s ridiculous-looking Avanti, the ugliest sports car ever. With its extended underbite front end, the Avanti appeared to have lost the futuristic design war that the Corvette Sting Ray had easily won. Hideous though it may have appeared, the Avanti nevertheless turned heads just as the DeLorean once did. Ebstein also designed the Lucky Strike cigarette package and Greyhound buses. —E.R.

George Atkinson

A former Hollywood stuntman and occasional actor, George Atkinson didn’t need Grauman’s Chinese Theater to leave his imprint on the film history. Atkinson pioneered the home video rental industry. In 1979 he turned a 600-square-foot store into a goldmine called Video Station by charging $50 for a membership card and a $10-per-day rental fee for any of 50 available titles. Scoffing at earlier entrepreneurial notions that people would buy movies, Atkinson summed up his business philosophy: “You listen to Beethoven or The Beatles over and over again. You don’t watch Burt Reynolds over and over.” Currently there are more than 24,000 video stores around the nation. Atkinson died at 69 of emphysema. —E.R.

Joseph Owades

Weight-conscious beer drinkers can thank Joseph L. Owades for inventing the first low-calorie beer. Miller Brewing Co. acquired the rights to the process Owades invented and launched Miller Lite in 1975, spawning the phrase “you might as well drink horse piss,” which was almost as popular a slogan as “tastes great, less filling.” —E.R.

Another Swindle Adventure

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2005-05-19 Books

Another Swindle Adventure

By Ed Reynolds

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May 19, 2005Author Michael Swindle has spent a lifetime chasing adventure as he pens stories for numerous national publications, including The Village Voice, Details, the New York Times Book Review, and The Washington Post. His eye for the bizarre has produced a stream of outlandish tales of cockfights and hot dog rodeos in Louisiana, hunting wild boar with pit bulls in the Everglades, and searching for hollering contests in North Carolina after discovering “hollerin’” recordings while on vacation in the Appalachians. “It’s a collection of nonfiction pieces that I have written over the past decade,” Swindle, a former Birmingham resident who now lives in New Orleans, explains of his latest book, Slouching Towards Birmingham: Shotgun Golf, Hog Hunting, Ass-Hauling Alligators, Rara in Haiti, Zapatistas, and Anahuac New Year’s in Mexico City. “I’m going for the longest subtitle of the year award,” he jokes. Among the stories are observations on the fanaticism of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry and his learning of George Harrison’s death while living in Mexico, where Spanish stations suddenly dropped their usual Hispanic music formats to spin Beatles tunes.

Swindle is currently traveling across the country for a series of readings and signings. “I’m going to the West Coast at the end of June. It’ll be the apex of my career. I’m going to do a reading at City Lights Books [famed San Francisco bookstore that was a home of sorts to the beat writers]. Those were the guys who got me started on the road to ruin in the first place,” he laughs. Michael Swindle’s road to ruin stops in Birmingham with a signing at Alabama Booksmith on Friday, May 27, at 4 p.m. He’ll also be appearing at Cosmo’s Pizza in Five Points South on May 29, at 3 p.m.

In Print — A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House

August 12, 2004

Odd as it may seem, considering the nonstop barrage of television ads and candidates stumping across the nation in yet another election year, the country once looked down upon open campaigning. From the time of George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, touting oneself as the best man for the job was considered degrading. Lincoln even refused to vote for himself. It was Stephen O. Douglas, Lincoln’s Democratic opponent in 1860, who broke the mold and became the first presidential candidate to openly campaign for himself.

This is one of many little-known but fascinating anecdotes detailing the oddball customs and downright dirty tricks surrounding America’s presidential campaigns, as told in A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the White House. It’s a hilarious book that shines light on the vast history of irreverence for the most sacred elected office in the nation. President Andrew Jackson was portrayed as a murderer in “The Coffin Handbill,” a flyer emblazoned with coffins and text detailing Jackson’s bloody misdeeds. The Cincinnati Gazette even attacked Jackson’s mother: “General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by the British soldiers! She afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which General JACKSON IS ONE!” For his part, Andrew Jackson accused his 1828 opponent, John Quincy Adams of being a “practicing pimp” for allegedly introducing Czar Alexander to young women when Adams was ambassador to Russia.

When Teddy Roosevelt journeyed to Africa for one of his legendary big game hunting expeditions, Roosevelt opponents publicly prayed that “every lion will do his duty.” Woodrow Wilson was declared not fit for office because “he was a long-haired professor.” When New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey entered the 1940 presidential ring, newspapers reported that Dewey had “thrown his diaper in the ring.” A favorite Republican slogan in 1948 was “To err is Truman.” It was a year when inflation was skyrocketing and Republican candidate Robert A. Taft, son of the former president, proclaimed “Let ‘em eat beans” in response to solutions to a dismal economic outlook.

The book also traces the evolution of political cartoons. Lincoln is portrayed as a monkey, while Ulysses S. Grant is depicted passed out drunk with an assortment of empty liquor bottles scattered at his feet. A sketch of Richard Nixon, complete with a prominent five o’clock shadow, queries: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

The authors save the best for last. At the end of the book is a photograph of every president. Beneath each is an insulting comment from one of their perceived critics. Of George Bush, Sr., humorist Art Buchwald declares: “He reminds every woman of her first husband.” A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House provides much-needed nonpartisan comic relief at a time when polarized America craves it most. —Ed Reynolds

Authors David E. Johnson and Johnny R. Johnson will be signing copies of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House at Alabama Booksmith on Monday, August 23, at 4 p.m.

All-American Jewboy

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2004-03-11 Features

All-American Jewboy

Author, humorist, beatnik, and professional hanger-on Kinky Friedman takes his show on the road to promote his new book.

By Ed Reynolds

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Penning a variety of oddball country songs that celebrate his life as the world’s most famous Jewish cowboy (“Ride ‘em Jewboy,” “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed”), Kinky Friedman has been making records with his band, The Texas Jewboys, since the early 1970s. His most fondly remembered tune is “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” an ode to the Texas architectural student who killed 16 people from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966. Friedman has also written 17 dark comedy thriller novels that feature himself and dozens of famous friends as characters. He loves animals; has a wealth of pals that includes President Bush, former President Clinton, Willie Nelson, Robert Duval, and Bob Dylan; and is currently considering a run for governor of Texas. “I have no skeletons in my closet,” Friedman readily admits. “The bones are all bleaching down at the beach.” He’s already designed his bumper sticker: He Ain’t Kinky. He’s My Governor.

Friedman currently has two new books he’s peddling, The Prisoner of Vandam Street and Curse of the Missing Puppet Head. He will sign copies of his novels at Alabama Booksmith on Thursday, March 18, and then deliver a lecture of sorts at the Reynolds-Kirschbaum Recital Hall at the Alys Stephens Center later that evening. As to whether or not he’ll read excerpts from his novels, tell jokes, give a stump speech, or sing, we have no idea. Neither does Friedman.



Author Kinky Friedman relaxes with a few of his buddies in Texas. (click for larger version)

B&W: Ever been to Alabama before?

Kinky: Yeah, the Jewboys played with B.J. Thomas in 1973 in Dothan. I played with the Rolling Thunder Revue in Mobile . . . I know the most famous man from Alabama—Jim Nabors. He’s a pretty good American, a funny guy. I just saw him last month in Hawaii. He was telling me that he went to this dinner given by an Asian friend of his in Hawaii. And when he showed up, he was the only white guy there. Everybody else was Oriental. So they sat Jim at the table, and the guy to his left looks like a guy from his health club. So Jim turns to the guy and says (with a Gomer Pyle inflection), “What actually do you do?” So the man says, “I’m the president of South Korea [laughs].” And then Jim says, “Well, I knew that, what else do you like to do?” That’s my Jim Nabors story.

B&W: Your publicist said that you were in Vietnam recently.

Kinky: Yes, just got back a week ago. I was visiting my sister, who’s head of the American Red Cross in Hanoi . . . It’s a beautiful, magical place, 80 million people. No Starbucks, no McDonalds, nothing like that . . . They love Americans.

Friedman is currently thinking about running for Governor of Texas. He’s already designed his bumper sticker: He Ain’t Kinky. He’s My Governor.

B&W: Were you in the Vietnam War?

Kinky: No, I was in the Peace Corps in Borneo, where I worked for several years as an agricultural extension worker helping people who have been farming successfully for more than 2,000 years.

B&W: Have you seen The Passion of the Christ yet?

Kinky: No, but you know, it’s doing pretty well. It might make a pretty good book!

B&W: Did it strike you as odd when Bob Dylan became a born-again Christian?

Kinky: Yeah . . . but actually, not with Bob. Bob says that art should not reflect a culture, it should subvert it. And he’ll try anything. So that’s one thing he tried.

B&W: Were you tempted to follow him?

Kinky: No. And it’s funny, because I’m not a very religious Jew at all. I’m not a practicing Jew, or as many people have commented, if I am, I need to practice a little bit more. I’m just a Jew in terms of the trouble-making aspect of the Jewishness, which is something that probably started with Jesus and Moses and descended all the way down to Groucho Marx, Karl Marx, Lenny Bruce.

B&W: I guess you’ve heard about our Ten Commandments judge here in Alabama.

Kinky: Roy Moore? He sounds like my kind of boy. The kind of man we need in my campaign for governor of Texas in 2006. The current governor has a hell of a lot of Gray Davis potential. I’d like to get the politicians out of politics. I’m a writer of fiction who tells the truth . . . George W. and Bill Clinton are fans of mine. I promise not to kiss any babies, I’ll just kiss their mothers. During the Friedman administration I’ll probably be spending most of my time in Vegas.

B&W: If you were elected president, would you free Tommy Chong? [Chong is currently serving a nine-month sentence for his affiliation with a company selling bongs featuring his autograph on the Internet.]

Kinky: President? That’s too hard a job. Too much work. I just want to be Texas governor . . . But I would certainly free him if I was. I’ll put in a good word with George next time I see him, because that’s ridiculous. Really ridiculous . . . I urinated next to Donald Rumsfeld a few months ago in Washington. I told him that he was not the most famous person I’ve ever urinated next to. That was Groucho Marx. But he was very nice.

B&W: Groucho or Rumsfeld?

Kinky: Rumsfeld. Groucho was not very nice. It was toward the end of his life.

B&W: How was sleeping at the White House?

Kinky: It was great. Laura is terrific. She was really my friend before I ever met George. I’ll tell you, it’s a looser ship than was run by Hillary Clinton, as far as smoking goes and things like that. You wouldn’t think so, but the Bushes are much looser about it. With the Clintons, you couldn’t smoke a cigarette or cigar anywhere.

B&W: Did you sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom?

Kinky: No, I visited the Lincoln Bedroom. I bounced on the bed a little bit. I was in a family compound on the third floor. When I visited the White House when the Clintons were there, Bill tried to get me a movie deal. That was very sweet of him. He brought in whatever the hell this woman’s name is who’s head of Paramount. He sat me next to her and she tells me during the meal, “The President says your books are great and that they’d make great movies. But who do you see playing Kinky?” I told her I see Lionel Ritchie. And negotiations broke down from there. But Bill tried.

B&W: Tell me about your animal rescue efforts on your ranch.

Kinky: It’s our fifth year and there are more than 500 animals that we’ve adopted out by this time. All kinds of abused and stray animals. We’re a “never kill” sanctuary. It’s really been great. If I’m elected governor, I’ll make this a “no kill” state . . . for animals, not criminals.

B&W: Does that mean you’ll put an end to hunting?

Kinky: No . . . Well, I might, but I’m not going to campaign that way. And of course you know my views on abortion: I’m not pro-choice and I’m not pro-life, I’m pro-football!

B&W: Did you ever cross paths with Gram Parsons?

Kinky: No, I didn’t, but I’m a great admirer of his. And I’ve always said that I’d rather be a dead Gram Parsons than a live Tim McGraw . . .

B&W: You’re a dead ringer for Warren Oates in the photo Don Imus took for the back of The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover.

Kinky: I take that as a great compliment. Imus and I met at the bottom of both of our lives. [Imus makes no secret that he had a serious cocaine habit at one point in his life.] I met him when we did a show together at the Bottom Line [famous New York City nightclub]. He’s a sick f**k.

B&W: What prompted you to switch from singing to writing?

Kinky: Desperation. I was in New York doing a lot of Peruvian marching powder, and pretty broke and playing the Lone Star Café once a week. I took a twirl on the writing—Greenwich Killing Time [Friedman's first novel]. I think about 25 publishers passed on the manuscript, and by that time, of course, we knew we had a pretty hot property [laughs]. And sure enough. So now this is about the 17th book that I’ve turned out . . . uhh, I mean ‘carefully crafted.’ I write on a typewriter. I’m getting a little tired of the characters, so I’m killing them off in the new book. Number 18 will be the end of the Kinkster. It’s called Ten Little New Yorkers. Unless we hear the great acclaim from the literary world that we must bring the Kinkster back, we’ll let him rest in peace.

B&W: You often cast your famous friends as characters in your novels. Anyone you haven’t cast that you’d like to?

Kinky: Bill Clinton, he wants to be a cameo character. He’s read all the books. I just don’t know how to work him in. Maybe I can work him into this last one. Now George . . . I’ve been told by a number of the press that I’m the President’s favorite author, but, of course, I always like to point out that he’s not that voracious a reader [laughs]. But Bill Clinton was.

B&W: Do you think that George sometimes gets a bad rap from your liberal friends?

Kinky: Yes, absolutely. I think he’s a smart guy. And I think that as far as foreign policy goes, I’m pretty much in agreement with him. On domestic policy, I’m pretty much not in agreement with him. I’m not a John Ashcroft fan.

B&W: Do you approve of gay marriage?

Kinky: Yeah, sure, why not? Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other. What the hell. Probably most of the people who vote for me are gonna be homosexuals anyway.

B&W: Are you still a vegetarian?

Kinky: No, I jettisoned that some time ago. I got rid of that. Probably not a good campaign quality to have here in Texas . . . I’m good for three minutes of superficial charm. So if I work a house quickly, people love me.

B&W: Did you ever consider yourself a hippie?

Kinky: No I didn’t, I always considered myself a beatnik.

B&W: Do you miss the ’60s?

Kinky: I missed them when they were happening. I was in the Peace Corps, and I wasn’t around. Probably saved my life. Maybe not. You gotta find what you like and let it kill you.

B&W: Do you remember where you were when Charles Whitman started shooting people from the tower at the University of Texas?

Kinky: Sure I do. I was at the camp for boys and girls that my parents ran here at our ranch. Yeah, that was quite an amazing thing. And that’s probably one of my better songs. That may be one of my better efforts [laughs extensively].

B&W: That was in 1966, and I was 11 years old and . . .

Kinky: You were jumping rope in a schoolyard, and I was selling dope in a schoolyard.

B&W: Did you ever play the Grand Ole Opry?

Kinky: Yeah, of course. Played it in ’73. Played it a couple of times, actually. We had Dobie Gray on with us. Billy Swan and the Jewboys were with me. After we performed, Reverend Jimmy Snow, Hank Snow’s son, introduced me as the first full-blooded Jew to ever appear on the Grand Ole Opry. The crowd went wild. &

Kinky Friedman will sign copies of his latest novels at Alabama Booksmith at 4 p.m. on Thursday, March 18. Call 870-4242 for details. He will give a “lecture” at the Reynolds-Kirschbaum Recital Hall at the Alys Stephens Center at 7 p.m. Admission is $34. For more information, call 975-2787 .