by Old Uncle Crow
[This is a letter I wrote to somebody last month that shows about my life back home “down on the farm,” and what a pain in the ass it could be, especially the vehicles! OUC]
23 February 2011
Dear John Klanck, it was either you or old Patrick Herd who said my Blog About Swearing In Rural Eagle Lake, Mn., In The 1950s is a “quagmire.”
Quagmire…Stagmire?
That takes me back….
Joe Stagmire was a young dog after WW II who bought a old Plymouth car from off of my Grandfather, Joe Outhousespidersson’s. Our Mother said that the car from new, in 1937 or so, had a habit of stopping. The engine would just quit. This went on while you were driving a long and trying to go some where. After a while it would agree to start up and keep running (for a while more, any way) and then you could go on your way some more, but there was no rhyme or reason to any of it.
That was when he got his teen age nickname, “Walking Joe” Stagmire, when that he bought that car.
I called him this when that we met up again in the Fall of’80 up at the elevator in Hairpin Lake, Mn., when that I moved home to superintend the ruin of the family farm by the IRS — he was in his fifties by then and didn’t like it, and so at a mere thirty-one I didn’t try saying that one again. You never know when you might to borrow something. Later, at the auction to pay for Old Reagen & All The GOP Senators Whining Around Behind David Stockman’s Back Like A Poison Pup, Joe Stagmire bought Uncle Emmett Outhousespidersson’s 1974 Ford XLT 3/4 ton pick up and fixed it all up, stock rack and all.
Pretty immediately (you guessed it!) the truck engine took to stopping, oh, at about 45-50 mph, that’s what Neighbor Jerome Copacic told me, any way, and any way I never did dare say any thing to Joe’s face about when that I did see him up at the eating restaurant, “Uncle Al’s,” there on Maindragstrasse (U.S. Hwy 14) in Eagle Lake, Mn.
Mrs. “Walking Joe” Stagmire was the same girl as that the one he was dating back in the Plymouth, and she was my niece’s and nephew’s kindergarten teacher in 1990 or so, and her and my sister Erika Outhousespidersson (aka Mrs. Danny Seatblister) were thicker than thieves then in spite of the age difference.
I guess those Ford distributor caps used to crack pretty often and let water in to the “sonofabitch,” that shorted the girl out for Joe Stagmire the second time around for sure, only the 1937 Plymouths didn’t use Ford distributor caps.
I don’t think so, any way, I mean they probably didn’t.
So I just don’t know what sonofabitch is to blame for THAT one.
All of those Stagmires are gone now.
Emmett Outhousespidersson
PS: Joe Stagmire pretty much thought that global warming was “a crock of shit” when that it first came up. So did Neighbor Jerome Copacic. I guess that we will all be dead and in Hell and sneezing in the sulphur and coal smoke, playing Rocky Horse on the Devil’s knee and saying, “Daddy, tell me a story!” and so we will know all about it for sure THEN.
[Old Uncle Crow
[copyrighted by tio cuervo
[March 10, 2011]
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