Honky Tonk Confidential – "Road Kill Stew" (2007)

The eating’s more fun

When the meat that you’re eating

Is hit and run

Earlier this month, the Oregon legislature unanimously passed a law making it legal to eat roadkill.

Oregonians can only chow down on deer and elk carcasses, and it’s not legal to give the meat to your dog or cat – the roadkill must be consumed by humans.

The death of the animal must have resulted from an accident.  Obviously, the state doesn’t want people hunting hoofed ruminants with automobiles.  

And the law requires you to deliver the head and antlers of any dead deer or elk you salvage to your local Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife office within five business days.  (I personally would be dropping off the head toot sweet rather than keeping it around the house for five days, but it’s nice of the state not to rush people.)

The fish and wildlife folks suggest you call to make an appointment before dropping by.  That sounds like a very good suggestion – you don’t want to show up only to find a half-dozen other roadkill harvesters have arrived ahead of you, forcing you to hang out in the waiting room with your deer or elk head until it’s your turn.) 

By the way, if the driver of the vehicle that hits the animal doesn’t want to take the carcass home, any roadkill gourmand who wanders by is free to harvest it – it’s a first-come, first-served situation.  

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I’m a little surprised that it was considered illegal in Oregon to consume roadkill prior to the enactment of the new law.  Is it really any of the state’s business if you want to cook up a big mess of roadkill stew?

And while the right to dine on roadkill isn’t expressly mentioned in the Constitution, we shouldn’t overlook the Ninth Amendment, which reads as follows:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In other words, just because the Constitution and its amendments explicitly state that Americans have particular rights – the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to a jury trial, etc. – that doesn’t mean that they have only those rights.

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For example, in 1965, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives because it infringed the right of marital privacy – even though the Constitution says nothing about such a right.

According to the Court, the “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees” that guarantee certain fundamental rights – such as the right to marital privacy.

From Justice Douglas’s majority opinion in that case:

Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?  The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship. . . . Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. 

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Justice Douglas talked the talk when it came to marriage.  But he also walked the walk – except for the “hopefully enduring” part.  He was married no fewer than four times.  

His third marriage – to a 23-year-old recent college graduate who had written her senior thesis on Justice Douglas – took place less than two years before he wrote the words quoted above, when he was 64.

Justice William O. Douglas with his fourth wife

But Douglas wasn’t done playing the marriage game.  In 1966, he divorced wife number three and married a 22-year-old college student who he had met at a mountain resort in Washington state.  He was vacationing there, while she had a summer job as a waitress.

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Two points before we move on.

First, while I don’t know this for a fact – I took a constitutional law course in law school in 1975, and haven’t paid much attention to the subject since then – I would bet that if there’s a constitutional right to marital privacy, there has to be a right to extramarital privacy as well.   (You definitely need to keep extramarital stuff private – right?)

Second, if marital privacy is protected by the Ninth Amendment as a fundamental right retained by the people, isn’t the same true of the right to consume roadkill?  (I think the question answers itself.)

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About half of Oregon’s four million-odd residents live in the Portland metropolitan area.  “Keep Portland Weird” is the city’s slogan, and from what you read in the papers, Portlanders are doing a pretty good job of doing just that.

I doubt that there’s much roadkill available in Portland, and I have a feeling that most Portlanders would eschew consuming it even if there was plenty of it to be found on the highways and byways of “The City of Roses.”  

But the eastern two-thirds of Oregon is quite rural, and I’m guessing that a fair number of deer and elk fall victim to fast-moving SUVs and pickups in that part of the state.  

Legalized roadkill is going to come in handy when the Democrats take over Washington, DC, someday.  They’ll immediately raise taxes and promulgate a bunch of anti-business regulations, which will put an end to the record low unemployment levels we’re enjoying these days.

When that happens, I predict that you’ll see thousands of hungry, jobless Oregonians driving around aimlessly in hopes that a nice, fat deer or elk will jump out in front of them.

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Click here if you’d like to view a how-to video titled “Butchering Roadkill Deer: Free All-Natural Organic Wild Venison.”  (WARNING: I hope you have a strong stomach if you decide to watch this video – you’ll need it.)

The creator of that video doesn’t see what all the fuss is about eating roadkill.

“It’s meat,” he said.  “Whether you buy it in a store or pick it up on the side of the road, it’s the same thing.”

Excuse me, but I beg to differ.  I don’t think it’s the same thing at all.

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“Road Kill Stew” was released in 2007 on Honky Tonk Confidential’s Road Kill Stew and Other News album:

If you’re looking to shed a few of those pounds you put on over the holidays, let me suggest that you listen to “Road Kill Stew” song the next time you’re hungry.  The lyrics to that song are guaranteed to put you off your feed.

Click here to listen to “Road Kill Stew.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Archie Eversole (ft. Bubba Sparxxx) – "We Ready" (2002)

We ready

We ready

We ready

For y’all

If you watched any NFL playoff games last weekend, you no doubt saw this commercial for the NFL:

It’s a great commercial – I put it in the same class as some of the great Nike TV spots of the past.

You probably also saw another commercial a number of times while watching the playoffs.  The “Anthem” spot – which advertised GMC’s fancy-schmancy new MultiPro six-function pickup tailgate:

The spot for the NFL features the chorus from Atlanta rapper Archie Eversole’s 2002 hit, “We Ready.”

The GMC commercial uses “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye,” a 1969 single by Steam, one of my favorite all-time one-hit wonders.

Watch both commercials and you’ll notice something: the basic riff of “We Ready” is exactly the same as the basic riff of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.”

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Archie Eversole was born in Germany in 1984 – both his parents were active-duty military at the time – but grew up in Atlanta. 

Eversole was something of a rap wunderkind – he was only 17 when his 2002 album, Ride Wit Me Dirty South Style, was released.  (The album would have been released even earlier if Eversole hadn’t been convicted of assault and sentenced to eight months in the poke.) 

I’m not sure what happened to Eversole after that, but he never released another album.  

However, in 2018 he wrote “United We Conquer,” which Atlanta’s professional soccer team (Atlanta United FC) has made its official team anthem.

It’s OK for an American soccer anthem, but it’s no “We Ready” – which has apparently become de rigger for high school football teams who want to psych themselves up before taking the field for a game.

Click here for “We Ready.”

And click below to order the song from Amazon:

Katie Ellen – "Lucy Stone" (2017)

I don’t believe in getting married

It’s a socioeconomic prison

(That’s what he said.)

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Many of the notable people that Wikipedia says are natives of my hometown – Joplin, Missouri – were born in a hospital in Joplin but grew up in a nearby town.

One such person was Jane Grant, who was born in Joplin in 1892, but went to school in Girard, Kansas – a town with fewer than 3000 residents that’s about 45 minutes northwest of Joplin.   

Jane Grant

I don’t recall ever passing through Girard, much less stopping there.  I got as far as Pittsburg – a much larger college town that had a number of bars where 18-year-olds could legally drink 3.2% beer – but no farther.

It turns out that Girard was a hotbed of socialism in the early 1900s.  Appeal to Reason, the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in the United States, was printed in Girard.  Its editor commissioned novelist Upton Sinclair to write The Jungle, which was serialized in Appeal to Reason.

Eugene Debs, who was the Socialist Party’s candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, lived in Girard for a number of years.

But I digress.

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I don’t know if Jane Grant’s parents were socialists, but her father was a miner – so it wouldn’t be surprising if he was.

Grant moved to New York City when she was just 16.  She told her parents that she wanted to learn to be a music teacher and then move back to Girard, which she later admitted was a big fib:

Although teaching voice was considered a cut above school teaching, I wanted no part of it.  At an early age, I had decided against both teaching and marriage.  In my secret heart I meant to remain in the East once I got there.  I would be a singer – perhaps go on stage.  But my secret must be carefully guarded, I knew, for no such idea would be tolerated by my mother’s religious family.

She was hired as a stenographer by the New York Times, but eventually became a reporter – the first female to be a full-time reporter for the Times. 

When the famed Times theatre critic Alexander Woollcott went to France to report on World War I, he arranged for Grant to became a singer with a USO-type organization.  He introduced her to Harold Ross, who wrote for Stars and Stripes, a weekly newspaper written by American soldiers for American soldiers.

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When she returned to New York City after the war, Grant became one of the group of writers who dined regularly at the Algonquin Hotel and later became famous as the “Algonquin Round Table.”

Jane Grant and Harold Ross

Grant married Harold Ross in 1920.  The next year, she and journalist Ruth Hale founded the Lucy Stone League, which was named after the first married American woman to retain her birth name after marriage.

Hale wrote a pamphlet that explained why the Lucy Stone League was founded:

We are repeatedly asked why we resent taking one man’s name instead of another’s – why, in other words, we object to taking a husband’s name, when all we have anyhow is a father’s name.  Perhaps the shortest answer to that is that in the time since it was our father’s name it has become our own –  that between birth and marriage a human being has grown up, with all the emotions, thoughts, activities, etc., of any new person. . . . Even aside from the fact that I am more truly described by the name of my father, whose flesh and blood I am, than I would be by that of my husband, who is merely a co-worker with me (however loving) in a certain social enterprise, am I myself not to be counted for anything?

Ross did not share his wife’s beliefs:

I never had one damn meal at home at which the discussion wasn’t of women’s rights and the ruthlessness of men in trampling women.  Grant and Ruth Hale had maiden-name phobias, and that was all they talked about, or damn near all.

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For several years, the couple lived on Grant’s paycheck and saved Ross’s salary until they had enough to get their new magazine off the ground.

The cover of the first
issue of the New Yorker

The New Yorker was not a big hit initially – a wealthy friend came through with a well-timed offer to invest in the magazine just when Grant and Ross thought they would have to suspend publication – but eventually became a financial and artistic success.  Its contributors included the many of the best journalists, critics, short-story writers, poets, and cartoonists in the world.

Grant and Ross divorced in 1929.  She visited Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union several times in the thirties in her capacity as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. 

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Grant married William Harris, a Fortune magazine editor, in 1939.  The couple moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, and founded White Flower Farm, which became one of the largest and most successful mail-order gardening businesses in the United States.

I’ve given amaryllis bulbs from White Flower Farms as gifts for years.  (If you've received one from me, you must be a very special person.)  They produce spectacular flowers:

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Grant rebooted the Lucy Stone League in 1950.  The League pushed the Census Bureau to allow married women to use their maiden names as their official names in census records.

In 1968, Grant published a memoir titled Ross, The New Yorker, and Me.  It was dedicated to her second husband, who had encouraged her to write it.

Jane Grant's memoir

Jane Grant died in 1972.  Her widower funded the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon, and donated his wife’s papers to the university.

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When pop-punk band Chumped broke up in 2016, front woman Anika Pyle and drummer Dan Frelly formed Katie Ellen, which took its name from a moniker used by Pyle’s great-grandmother, who – like Jane Grant – was a feminist who pursued a career in journalism.

“Lucy Stone” was the lead single from Katie Ellen’s debut LP, Cowgirl Blues, which was released in 2017.

Click here to listen to “Lucy Stone.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Marvin Gaye – "Hitch Hike" (1962)

Got no money in my pocket

So I'm going to have to hitch hike all the way

[Note: This is the third in a series of four 2 or 3 lines posts about famous and infamous natives of Joplin, Missouri – my hometown.]

You have to feel sorry for people who suffered through awful childhoods.

Billy Cook’s childhood was about as bad as it gets, but it’s hard to feel sorry for him.  

Billy Cook's left hand

That’s because Cook shot and killed a farmer who stopped to give Cook a ride when he was hitchhiking one day in 1950.  

He also killed the farmer’s wife, their three children (who were 7, 5, and 3 years old), and the family dog, and threw their bodies down an abandoned mine shaft.

I don’t care how miserable a childhood Billy Cook had – nothing excuses what he did to that innocent family.

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William Edward “Billy” Cook Jr. was born in Joplin in 1928.    

Billy’s mother died  when he was five.  His unemployed father moved into an abandoned mine with him and his seven brothers and sisters.  One night, after getting a snootful in a local tavern, he hopped a freight and left his children to fend for themselves.  (That may not be the most heartless thing a father has ever done to his children, but it’s right up there.)

Local authorities discovered the children and found homes for all of them except Billy, who was later described by Time magazine as a “small, ugly child with a deformed right eyelid.”  He became a ward of the state.

Billy Cook's mug shot

Young Billy was a truant and a petty thief, and was sent to a reformatory when he was 12.  When he was 17, he was transferred to the Missouri State Penitentiary, where he assaulted a fellow inmate who made fun of his droopy eyelid with a baseball bat.  (Do prisons still allow inmates to play baseball?  Hopefully not.)

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Billy was released from prison in 1950, when he was 21.  He returned to Joplin and tracked down his father, telling him that he planned to “live by the gun and roam.”

Cook then headed west, and ended up working as a dishwasher in Blythe, California, a desert town where the high temperature once reached 124 degrees.

After a short time in Blythe, Billy drifted back east.  He bought a .32-caliber revolver in El Paso and used it to steal the car of a man who had picked Cook up when he was hitchhiking near Lubbock.

The stolen car ran out of gas near Tulsa, so Cook reverted to hitchhiking.  He was picked up by a farmer from Illinois, who was driving to New Mexico with his wife, three children, and the family dog.  

Cook pulled his gun and forced the farmer to drive from Oklahoma to Wichita Falls, Texas, then to Carlsbad, New Mexico, then to El Paso, then to Houston, then to Winthrop, Arkansas, and then back toward Joplin.  

A biography of Billy Cook

He finally shot and killed the entire family – including the dog – and dumped their bodies in a mine shaft.  (The odds are it wasn’t the same mine where his father abandoned Billy and his siblings – the Joplin area is home to many abandoned lead and zinc mines.) 

Cook headed back west, abandoning the farmer’s car – which was bloody and full of bullet holes – along the way.  When authorities found the car, the receipt for Cook’s .32 revolver was inside.

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Back in Blythe, Cook took a deputy sheriff hostage.  He told the deputy about killing the farmer and his family, then forced him to get out of the car and to lie down in a ditch.  But instead of shooting him, Cook drove away in the deputy’s car.  

He then kidnapped a motorist from Seattle, shot him in the head, and left his body in the deputy’s car near Ogilby, a now-abandoned town near Yuma, Arizona.  He drove the Seattle man’s car to Mexicali, Mexico and abandoned it there.

Cook managed to avoid all the law enforcement officers who were looking for him and made it back to Blythe, where he kidnapped two men who were on a hunting trip.  He drove with them to the Baja California town of Santa Rosalita.

Billy Cook with Mexican police

Santa Rosalita police chief Francisco Morales recognized Cook on the streets of the town, snatched the .32 revolver Cook had stuck in his belt, and arrested him.

“I hate everybody’s guts,” Cook supposedly said after the was arrested, “and everybody hates mine.”

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After he was captured, Cook was returned to Oklahoma, where he was found guilty of murdering the farmer and his family and sentenced to 300 years in prison.

After that he was tried in California for the murder of the Seattle man, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on December 12, 1952.  

Peace Church Cemetery today

His body was returned to Joplin and buried in an unmarked grave in the Peace Church Cemetery, which is located just north of the intersection of North Schifferdecker Avenue and West Zora Street.

Some people believe that Cook’s restless spirit still haunts the overgrown cemetery.

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The 1953 movie, The Hitch-Hiker, was inspired by Cook’s crime spree.  The film’s hitch-hiking murderer – who is portrayed by William Talman – even has an eyelid that doesn’t close all the way, just like Cook.  (Those of you who are my age or older will recognize Talman as District Attorney Hamilton Burger from the Perry Mason TV series, which aired from 1957 to 1966.)  

The Hitch-Hiker was one of eight movies directed by Ida Lupino, an actress who starred in dozens of Hollywood films before turning her hand to directing.  She also directed more than 100 network television series episodes.

Ida Lupino

Paste magazine included The Hitch-Hiker on its list of the 100 best film noirs of all time:

As a woman-helmed production, The Hitch-Hiker was a rarity in its heyday, though if you didn’t know [Ida] Lupino held the reins, you might not guess the film was directed with a feminine touch.  The Hitch-Hiker was as much an anomaly in Hollywood as it was a change of pace for Lupino, who, after directing four features that each revolved around the struggles and victimization of women, decided to try her hand with decidedly more masculine fare.  Decades later, her film is still generally considered the first noir directed by a woman, but it should really be thought of first as a slim, unsparing, suspenseful slice of true crime.  She puts her foot on the gas and doesn’t let up until the very end.

Click here if you’d like to watch The Hitch-Hiker.

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“Hitch Hike,” which was released in 1962, was Marvin Gaye’s first top-forty single.  

Click here to watch Marvin Gaye perform “Hitch Hike” in the 1964 concert movie, the T.A.M.I. Show, which I saw at the old Lux Theatre in Joplin when I was 12 years old.  (One of the go-go dancers is the criminally underappreciated actress, Teri Garr.)

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Gary Puckett & The Union Gap – "Young Girl" (1968)

Better run, girl 

You’re much too young, girl

[Note: This is the second in a series of four 2 or 3 lines posts about noteworthy natives of Joplin, Missouri – my hometown.]

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Televangelist Jim Bakker was called “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history” by The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who took over Bakker’s PTL (“Praise the Lord”) empire when Bakker was accused of financial fraud and sexual irregularities.

Tony Alamo in 1993

But Pentecostal preacher Tony Alamo’s scandalous behavior – which included embezzlement, failure to pay income taxes, and the sexual abuse of young girls – made Bakker look like an amateur.

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Tony Alamo was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman in Joplin, Missouri in 1934.  His father was a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was once Rudolf Valentino’s dance instructor.  At least that’s what Alamo later claimed.  

Alamo moved from Joplin to Los Angeles when he was a teenager in hopes of becoming a recording star.  He changed his name to Tony Alamo because Italian-American singers were quite popular in the sixties.  

After going to jail on a weapons charge, Tony married Edith Opal Horn – who then changed her name to Susan – in 1966.

Tony and Susan Alamo

Susan – who was also Jewish – was a divorcée who had moved from Alma, Arkansas to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a movie star, but she ended up supporting herself by scamming churches.

According to Tony, he and Susan converted to Christianity after Jesus came to him during a meeting at a Beverly Hills investment firm and told him to preach the second coming of Christ.  

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The Alamos started out as Hollywood street preachers, then established the Music Square Church.  Their followers lived communally and turned over the paychecks they received from outside jobs to the Alamos, who used the money to build a church and buy a number of businesses – including a grocery store, restaurant, and Western-wear store – in Dyer, Arkansas.

Alamo ran into trouble with the U.S. Department of Labor in 1976 because he didn’t pay his followers for their work in those businesses.  Later he ran into trouble with the IRS, which revoked Alamo Ministries’ tax-exempt status and prosecuted him for failure to pay taxes.  Alamo eventually spent four years in a federal prison for tax evasion.

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Susan Alamo died of cancer in 1982.  Tony insisted that she would be resurrected, so he kept her embalmed body on display at his church’s headquarters for six months after her death.  When the feds raided those headquarters, Alamo and his followers skedaddled with the body.  Years later, Susan’s daughter from a previous marriage went to court and was granted custody of her mother’s body.

Tony Alamo with Mr. T

It seems that Tony never got over the death of Susan.  In 1984, he married Brigitta Gyllenhammar who later claimed that he insisted she have plastic surgery so she would resemble Susan.

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Some believe that Tony was married four times prior to marrying Susan, so Brigitta may have his sixth wife instead of his second.

I’m not counting the two 15-year-old girls he reportedly married after Susan’s death because those marriages were presumably not legal.  (Although we are talking Arkansas here – so anything is possible.)

Later Alamo had “wives” who were even younger.  He preached that girls should marry once they start menstruating. “God impregnated Mary when she was about 11 years old.  So the government idiots, the people that don't know the Bible, what you're going to have to do is get a hold of God now, you're going to have to get up there and cuff him and send him to prison for statutory rape,” he said.

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In 2009, Tony was convicted of TEN COUNTS of taking underage girls across state lines in order to have sex with them.  He was sentenced to 175 years in prison.

Tony Alamo leaving his sentencing hearing

A few years later, an Arkansas judge awarded seven former Tony Alamo Christian Ministries $525 million – the largest personal-injury judgment in Arkansas history.  (I assume that little, if any of that judgment was ever collected.)

Alamo was 82 when he died in a federal prison in 2017.

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I don’t think that a record company would touch our featured song with a ten-foot pole if someone brought in a demo of that song today.

But it appears that no one was bothered by the creepiness of “Young Girl” in 1968, when it was a #2 hit single for Gary Puckett & The Union Gap in 1968.

Click here to listen to “Young Girl.”

And click on the link below if you’d like to buy the song from Amazon:

Miss Toni Fisher – "The Big Hurt" (1959)

Now it begins, now that you've gone

Needles and pins, twilight till dawn

Watching that clock till you return

2 or 3 lines is ending the year on a serendipitous note.

While I was researching the song featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines – “Friends,” by Feather – I saw a photo of the 45 of that song, which credited J. R. Shanklin as the producer.

I Googled Shanklin and discovered that his father – Wayne Shanklin, Sr. – was born in 1916 in Joplin, Missouri, which is where I was born.

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Fewer than 40 people from Joplin have Wikipedia pages.  (I’m not one of them.  There’s still hope, I suppose, but I need to get busy.)

Several of them – NASCAR driver Jamie McMurray, golfer Hale Irwin, NFL lineman Grant Wistrom, soccer midfielder Jack Jewsbury, and baseball players Darrell Porter and Tito Landrum – were professional athletes.  (Wistrom grew up in Webb City, MO, and Irwin’s family lived in nearby Baxter Springs, KS, but both were born in Joplin hospitals.)

A couple of major television stars – Bob Cummings (who had his own network sitcom, The Bob Cummings Show, in the late 1950s) and Dennis Weaver (who starred in Gunsmoke and McCloud) – also hailed from Joplin.

Other notable Joplin natives include poet and Harlem Renaissance figure Langston Hughes, romance novelist Norma Lee Clark (who was Woody Allen’s personal assistant for over 30 years), model railroader extraordinaire John Whitby Allen, and silent-film actress Pauline Starke – not to mention Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead of Blondie comic strip fame.

The next three 2 or 3 lines posts will feature three other notable people that I never knew were Joplin natives.  

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It turns out that “Friends” producer J. R. Shanklin was actually Wayne Shanklin, Jr. – the records he produced usually credited him as “Jr.” or “J. R.”

Wayne Jr. was one of five children born to Wayne Sr. and his first wife, who divorced after eight years of marriage.

Wayne Sr. quickly remarried and had four more children by his second wife.

Later he married his longtime secretary.  They had one child.

Wayne Sr. released an album and several singles in the 1950s, none of which sold very well.  (His first single was titled “Up to My Pockets in Tomahawks.”  Hard to believe that it wasn’t a hit.)

He had better luck as a songwriter.  His most famous song was “The Big Hurt,” which was a #3 hit for Miss Toni Fisher in 1959.  

Some sources claim that Shanklin and Toni Fisher were married at some point, but there seems to be no official record of that marriage.  (Her daughter did marry one of Shanklin’s sons.)

“The Big Hurt” is considered by most to be the first record to use a phasing sound effect called “flanging.”  You can click here to learn more about flanging, or you can just click here to listen to the song.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: