Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

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OK, this is too bizarre.

I found out from reading my home county paper that a man well-known to my family -- and for whom I worked while in and just out of high school, had died.

Read the obit. Notice the pall bearers and honorary pall bearers. I count myself among the honorary pall bearers, as an expat member of the "farming community of the Arkansas River basin."

How nice. And odd, yet nice, to read about it in the paper.

"Hey, Dr. ER," I said, "I'm an honorary pall bearer!"

"Do what?" she said, so I explained.

I do accept the honor. The man was a good man, although he had his eccentricities -- who amongst us doesn't? Those of us who hail from the Arkansas River basin seem to have more than most people. We're rednecks, OK? And we're not ashamed or embarrased about it.

The deceased, local lore goes, chased repo men off his humble place with firearms once, at least, when they came to take back a tractor or tractors and-or some other equipment when he got in some financial trouble. He kept farming.

The deceased started building a truck stop along the state highway that cuts through the bottoms once in the '70s, maybe even in the late '60s. He ran out of money, or credit, or both, and the barely started structure, weed-choked and betreed, stands to this day (unless somebody has knocked it down in the past year or so).

My best friend in high school worked for him in the fields. I picked an inside job, working for him as a retail petroleum distribution engineer (worked at the fuel desk) at a truck stop-restaurant he opened later in my home town.

Once in the wee hours, with the restaurant closed and no customers to be seen, I locked the cash register and went to the other end of the building to play Space Invaders, as I recall. When the machine beat me, I threw the keyring of keys against a wall, where they ricocheted and slid across the floor and under the locked door to his office. Oh, s--t.

Had no choice but to call him and get him out of bed, and he had to come to the truck stop quick to unlock his office to retrieve the keys; the cash register was locked, but the fuel pumps were not, and if someone had fueled, I couldn't have taken their money, or check, unless it was exact, of course.

He showed up puzzled and half asleep, but not angry. That was about the time I got the reputation among the handful of truck stop owners and managers I worked for of being one who could "tear up an anvil with a puff ball."

Mem'ries ...

Now, go back and look again at the honorary pall bearers -- and this is the real reason I thought I'd blog about this. See that name, "Jerry Whitworth"? Does it ring a bell? It might, if you're around your mid 40s at least and were paying attention to the news in the last throes of the Cold War in the mid '80s.

You might recall the John Walker Jr. spy case. You might, but probably do not, recall the name Jerry Whitworth.

I did not, and do not, know Whitworth. But he was characterized as a "troubled and reluctant spy." Having been troubled and reluctant in the doing of questionable deeds myself on occasion, I will not judge the man. Of course, if he did the things he did he deserved what he got.

I'll spare you the details, but he was caught and convicted, and he had my home town -- and the "farming community of the Arkansas River basin" in the national and international news quite a bit, right up until the day in 1986 when he was sentenced to a gozillion years in the federal pen, where he remains, in Atwater, Calif.

Such is the company I recently kept on the obit page. All I'm saying is it's kind of weird.

--ER