When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes

"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"--