Although my father didn’t have but two years at Humansville High school after graduating from Eighth Grade at Rosebud School (a one room school his grandfather help organize, with the nearest post office being the tiny town of Sexton, which changed it’s name to Hamlet (after the then owner) and finally to the actual town the fictional Jed Clampett hailed from, Bug Tussle) my father was a handsome, well mannered, man who accomplished two extraordinary things in his life:
1. He won and married the most beautiful of two daughters of famous local author Myrtle Cahow “Ma” Agee, who wrote for The Index at Hermitage, Missouri. Because of this, Ma Agee married off her “purdy daw-ter Saydee who had jay bird heels to a boy who lived way over in Polk County near Bug Tussle”. This insured my father a measure of reflected glory, as Saydee’s husband.
2. I still have the plans for the scientifically designed elevated stanchion four cow Grade A milk barn my father worked with the University of Missouri to build, and I still own the milk barn. Between folks coming to see Saydee, who really did live south of Bug Tussle (Ella Mae Clampett, played by Donna Douglas, was a cheap dime store blond compared to my Mama) my father’s model milk barn drew university professors and agriculturists and occasionally cultural anthropologists who were aware there really was such a town as Bug Tussle, which joins our home place on the north side.
I learned out in the milk barn, listening to visitors, that in this world are experts on everything from why I talk like I do, to which brand of filter that strains milk the best, to which cow gives the best tasting milk.
My Daddy kept 25 cows, more or less, milking all the time. Usually he kept one Jersey cow, the remainder Holsteins.
He’d milk a pair of cows every eight minutes and spend two minutes changing milkers and letting out Holsteins.
For eight out of ten minutes he’d visit with the folks that came to watch the show. My mother, and often Ma Agee herself, would come and serve sweet tea, coffee, and pastries to visitors, then visit with their wives.
If a visitor wanted to sample the milk, which I understood was of questionable legality since it was unpasteurized, Daddy always had them come in when he milked that odd numbered hind cow, the Jersey that gave the sweetest and best tasting milk. He’d milk the cow, and my mother would put the container on ice, then shake it up again and serve the milk.
The tasters would always agree, that milk beat all they’d even dreamed of tasting.
Was it the Jersey, or the show that produced the milk?
If Algerian briar wasn’t best, it’s promoters tried to make it best.
YOU BEAT ALL I’VE EVER SEEN