The Road to Pickletown: A Southerner Confronts Cowbells, Clowns, Cuba, Christmas, and Mississippi

By William Jeanes

"The Road to Pickletown" is a collection of newspaper columns by William Jeanes, a former editor-in-chief and publisher of Car and Driver magazine who lives in Mississippi. The pieces include an eclectic selection of recent columns from William's weekly newspaper, the Northside Sun. The Sun is headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi. The columns range in tone from warmly humorous to serious outrage and cover subjects that veer from progressive politics to prohibition and from cowbells to Cuba. Most but by no means all have a connection to Mississippi and the south—as seen by a native son who spent more than half his life in New York City and in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Other columns were written for a national audience and were published in Playboy, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Car and Driver, and Automobile. Their subjects include the joys of driving at night, wartime baseball, the woman who struck out Babe Ruth, the Safari Rally in Kenya, shooting sporting clays, and Elvis as a film critic.
In addition to the publications cited, William's work has appeared in American Heritage, Air & Space Smithsonian, the New York Times, Consumer Digest, New Times, Advertising Age, and more automotive publications than he cares to count.
William left Mississippi twice, once to serve as an officer in the US Navy, and once to work for magazines and advertising agencies. He was gone for almost forty years. Long enough to gain perspective on a country that delivers endless fuel for a writer who can spot the fools, frauds, and feeble thinkers from a considerable distance.
The author of "The Road to Pickletown" lives in Ridgeland, Mississippi. He has been a board member of the Eudora Welty Foundation, writer-in-residence at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and is a Life Trustee of Millsaps College, his alma mater.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098338985

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ISBN: 978-1-09833-897-8

eISBN: 978-1-09833-898-5

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To a grandmother who sometimes let me read her daily journal and to a grandfather who taught me to read when I was four.

Contents

FOREWORD – P. J. O’Rourke

INTRODUCTION – William Jeanes

LIFE IN MISSISSIPPI

Coming Home

Hang That Christmas Tree

Not So Fast, Wonder Boy

Good Nutrition and Lots of It

A Dog In Full

Remember Your First Job?

Land of Possums and Paradoxes

Looking Down on Mississippi

Your Tag Tells Tales

Prohibition Mississippi Style

The Lost Picture Show

Cowbells at 100 Decibels

The Road to Pickletown

HISTORY and NOSTALGIA

A Genuine Giants Cap

The Wacky World of Wartime Baseball

Some Ole Miss Football History

What About World War One?

Central High School’s Days of Thunder

How I Passed Gunnery 101

COMMENTARY

The Laugh Comes at Our Expense

A Look Back at 2016

Quarantine: Get Into Jail Free

Allegations Alone Just Aren’t Enough

How to Cure The Bad Driving Virus

Is There a Geezer Exemption?

Don’t Bet On That Free Lunch

News as Trivial Pursuit

Animal Farm Comes to Our Town

If You Can’t Trust a Lobbyist…

University Officials Arrest a Southern Bell

Held Over Forever: the Civil War

Hand It Over, Tightwad

Grumpy Christmas Gifts

A Marriage in Crystal Springs

A Word About Voter ID

TRAVEL and LEISURE

In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan

Two Days in Havana

The East Africa Safari Rally

The Dawn Patrol

A Little Night Music

Controlling Your Cruise

Mississippi for Travelers

Don’t Wait. Procrastinate Now!

ENTERTAINMENT

Familiarity Breeds Clichés

How to Keep the Ball Rolling

I Knew What Tonto Looked Like

A Week Without Celebrities

We’re Running Out of Clowns

What Would Elvis Do?

The Ultimate SPAM File

Ignore Your Stool at Your Peril

A Shot in the Park

PEOPLE

Welcome Aboard the Red Ass, Honorable Son

Theodore’s Thoughts on America

Red Tails in the Sunset

Castro: My Part In His Missile Program

The Jackie Mitchell Story

Dark Theater, Bright Star

Sixty Years of Amateur Theater

Passages

EPILOGUE

Four Score and Then Some

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD – P. J. O’Rourke

In The Road to Pickletown William Jeanes does something I’ve never seen a writer accomplish. He writes a conversation.

Many journalists try for a conversational tone. Mostly this is just a way for them to be the person at a party who never shuts up—immune to all social signals that it’s time to change the subject or let somebody else say something. William never indulges in that kind of monologue logorrhea and monotony monotone. He doesn’t talk at you, he talks with you.

He does this with deft use of those ever-cheerful Bobbsey Twins of style, brevity and wit. But there’s more than that to William’s art. He seems able to listen to you as he writes. He has a sort of telepathy about your response to what he’s saying. You the reader are there with him in his prose.

Pickletown delivers every pleasure of good conversation. William’s phrases are keepsakes, an approval-seeking puppy with a fetched ball in its mouth. His views are broad but never so wide that they block the door to discourse, This is a bipartisan column. Both liberals and conservatives stand in imminent peril of learning something from it. Subjects vary wonderfully, A wandering mind is as good as a brisk walk. Everything comes up including the virtues of fried Spam, the oddities of World War II baseball, and whether we old geezers should be allowed to drive. Each polished apple of a new topic comes with a core of information you didn’t know, At 45 mph, you cover 66 feet in a single second . . . If you’re looking forty feet ahead of your front bumper, you’re looking at history.

William displays sentiment when sense demands it, but soppiness never wets the page. William shows scorn, but the laugh is on people who can (more than) afford it. Not that covering the Kardashians isn’t a fine idea. A big, thick tarpaulin might work. And William reminisces but in full knowledge that nostalgia has its root in the ancient Greek words for coming home and pain. William is never a pain about it.

However, to get the real essence of having a conversation with William Jeanes (which you’re about to do and which it has been my pleasure to do also, on and off, for more than forty years) it’s probably best to let William explain his writing technique for himself:

Avoid clichés like the plague. A hearty ‘hats off’ to the man or woman who gave us that pearl of wisdom. Those are, as sure as I’m sitting here, words for writers to live by. Though I’m busier than a one-armed paperhanger, and I’ve got a lot on my plate, I’ll take time out of my busy day to clue you in about how clichés can ruin your whole day.

P. J. O’Rourke

March Hare Farm

New Hampshire

2020

INTRODUCTION

William Jeanes

If you are from Mississippi and you write for a living, the state’s literary heritage will haunt you, beginning with William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and Richard Ford—all prizewinners, all novelists, all heavyweights. Mississippi’s roster lists far more than its share of first-rate authors and playwrights. Mississippi is the New York Yankees of literature.

There exists, however, a parallel universe of Mississippi writers—men and women who wrote—and write—about politics, news, sports, food, and other non-fiction subjects. Many do so on the national stage, and they write well. I belong to this other universe, and were I from South Dakota or Utah it wouldn’t matter. But being a newspaper or magazine writer in Mississippi is like being the possum in a petting zoo—people know you’re there but don’t want much to do with you.

My name is William Jeanes and you are holding a collection of columns that I wrote for the Northside Sun, a prosperous and principled weekly newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. Most of the columns concern life in Mississippi, where I now live and where I was born. The book also includes material that I wrote for Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and the Saturday Evening Post during my time in New York City and Grosse Pointe, Michigan. I was an imitation Yankee for almost thirty-five years as a writer, editor, and advertising executive.

My national credits are simple enough. I was editor-in-chief and publisher of Car and Driver, then the largest automotive publication in the world. I was simultaneously the publisher of Road & Track. My writing has appeared in everything from Sports Illustrated, American Heritage, and the New York Times to Air & Space Smithsonian, the Saturday Evening Post, and Playboy. In 2004, I was writer in residence at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. I taught one semester of non-fiction writing at Millsaps College, and I have lectured at a number of major universities. With my pal Charlie Hughes I co-authored Branding Iron, a book on the art of branding and the frequent missteps of our automobile industry.

Several columns in this collection treat national topics—the ones on voter identification, gratuitous safety warning labels, and media smugness are examples. I included two from my days as an officer in the US Navy, along with columns about some remarkable men and women who I thought were just better persons than most of us and ought to be written about.

Other bits I wrote solely for fun: the history of Spam (the meat, not the computer infestation), the two columns on clichés—both of which are too amusing for words—real thigh slappers. And there are several Christmas columns.

Some of the columns draw on my experiences as an advertising executive, an editor, a diesel mechanic, a bartender, an amateur actor, a veteran of the Cannonball coast-to-coast race, and a traveler who has seen all seven continents and more than one hundred countries.

During my time in the non-fiction trenches, I worked to make everything that I wrote or published interesting, entertaining, and informative. I hope this collection does at least two of the three for you.

At a minimum, you’ll learn where Pickletown, Mississippi, is and how it earned its name.

William Jeanes

Ridgeland, Mississippi

2020

LIFE IN MISSISSIPPI

This column began as a book review of Coming Home To Mississippi —a 2013 essay compilation edited by Charlene McCord and Judy Tucker. I was one of the collection’s contributing writers. Another was Willie Morris, who—posthumously—managed to hijack my review.

Coming Home

Northside Sun, 2013

If you were born in Mississippi but left it for somewhere else, and if you learned that a Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey elephant named Carol had been the victim of a drive-by shooting in Tupelo, would you ever move back to your native state?

Despite Carol’s unfortunate experience, you just might. The elephant is recovering, by the way.

A while back, Charline McCord of Clinton asked me to contribute to a book of essays she was editing. The book, Coming Home to Mississippi, features pieces by thirty-four people who chose to leave Mississippi and then, each for their own reasons, elected to come back.

Coming Home follows a well-received earlier collection, Growing Up in Mississippi. Both books were co-edited by Judy Tucker of Jackson. The Growing Up collection, published in 2008, was just what it sounds like: recollections from the memory bins of such varied personalities as William Winter, B.B. King, Ellen Douglas, and Jerry Rice.

Coming Home’s authors are likewise diverse—in every way you could imagine—and their writings are equally distinctive. You can see for yourself because Coming Home to Mississippi has just gone on sale.

When I got my advance copy in March, the first thing I did was read my own essay. All writers do that, and if you run across one who claims otherwise, never loan him money or trust him to feed your cat.

Then I read the other essays—written by established luminaries such as Willie Morris, Barry Hannah, Morgan Freeman, Sela Ward, and Mississippi’s original poster child, Mary Ann Mobley. Their thoughts, and those of the twenty-nine others range from funny to heartbreaking, introspective to in-your-face, revealing to cautious. Most Mississippians will like something about each of the pieces in Coming Home.

Two of Coming Home’s finest writers, Barry Hannah and Willie Morris, have left us and gone off to the celestial writers conference. Of the two, Willie garnered the most mentions from his fellow contributors. Unless you count the offhand but inevitable nods to William Faulkner.

Artist Bill Dunlap, in the book’s leadoff essay, called Willie Morris our greatest memoirist. Others recalled his penchant for telling expatriate Mississippians to come on home.

As I began writing this, I had to go to my ancient secretary with its double doors of wavy glass where I keep books that mean something to me. I needed to consult my copy of Growing Up to refresh my memory of its writers.

Once I’d done that, I began looking at the other books on the shelves. There were my copies of After All, It’s Only a Game and Always Stand In Against the Curve, both by Willie Morris. His marvelous Faulkner’s Mississippi lay horizontally atop those volumes and some other Morris works including my favorite, Terrains of the Heart, a collection of essays that speak of home.

Two of the Willie Morris books were inscribed to me, the earliest from 1992. Could it have been twenty-one years since Willie and I and Lynn Green Root, the artist for After All, It’s Only a Game, had been at a Lemuria book signing?

I was nearing the end of my time as editor-in-chief at Car and Driver magazine and the year before had commissioned and published a piece by Willie. His inscription called me a great editor, which means that my company’s check cleared, and Root’s inscription consisted of a scrawly 1950s-style tail fin and the exclamation Dusemberg! a catastrophic misspelling of Duesenberg. I would have been editor enough to catch that.

Just as writers read their own stuff first, they are also generous to each other. Willie’s inscription in Faulkner’s Mississippi calls me a distinguished writer, which I am not. Competent perhaps, but hardly distinguished. But that wasn’t the important part of the inscription anyway. The important part was Willie writing, Come on back home, now.

I remember sharing a drink or three with Willie at Hal & Mal’s, which we did a few times. The last time, when I rose to say goodbye and head back to Michigan, we shook hands. Willie looked up at me and said, Come home, William.

Willie died before I came home, but I will forever treasure his invitation. •

Most of my little-kid Christmases took place during World War II in my hometown of Corinth, Mississippi. Even with the men serving overseas, our Decembers would have intrigued Norman Rockwell—though he wouldn’t likely have chosen us as models.

Hang That Christmas Tree

Saturday Evening Post, 2011

My earliest recollections are of Christmas trees, but the difference between today’s tree ornaments and those we had in 1942 Mississippi is bigger than your January Visa bill. Decorations are less tasteful and traditional than they once were, but as good Americans, we’re proud to say they cost ten times as much.

Christmas accessories during the 1940s cost virtually nothing. Our tree-topping star, for example, was a cardboard cutout layered with wrinkled tinfoil. It looked loopy on the tree, but it was ours. My grandmother made it, and the world is fortunate that she was a homemaker and not a surgeon.

Our lopsided star shared a dusty cardboard box with the other decorations: strings of lights, tinfoil icicles that we removed each year and saved for next Christmas, limp strings of tired tinsel, and colorful glass balls that would break if you glared at them. Angels, stars, candy canes, and Santa ornaments completed the cache.

My grandmother’s house was neither rich nor poor, and it also harbored my grandfather, called Pop. He once wrote a letter to President Roosevelt. Some New Deal flunky, not FDR, wrote back. Pop’s brush with greatness notwithstanding, the frame house on Sixth Street in Corinth was forever spoken of as Mom’s, our synonym for grandmother. At Christmas 1942 it housed Mom, Pop, one aunt, my younger first cousin, and me. Despite severe wartime dislocations, our family had Christmas. And decorated for it.

In early December, Pop would haul us out into the country to cut down a tree, usually a six-foot cedar. We never used pine trees because they dried out and their needles fell off. The same was of course true of cedars, but somehow that was okay.

Once the tree was home, Pop nailed two boards to its trunk and covered the makeshift stand with cotton batting that looked as if it might have come from a Confederate first-aid station. My cousin was two, and I was four, making us less help and more trouble than a drunk giving travel directions. But the decorating began.

We wrapped the tree with strings of lights that were wired in series, meaning that if one bulb failed, they all went out. You had to unscrew each bulb and try a new one. When the string lighted back up, you knew you’d found the bad bulb. Had the Axis Powers pirated and implemented this technology, the war would have been over in