Christmas letter, 2009

Dear friends and family, During the early years of the First Great Depression, little Diggie and her big sister Freoda lived in a railcar idled, like their Dad, by lack of work. It was parked on a sidetrack (now you know where that name comes from) among other occupied railcars in a bizarre, desperate little suburb of sorts, a refuge for Missouri Pacific RR employees trying to survive the most terrifying time of their lives.

Sam, the Christmas Turkey

Praters occasionally obsess.  And Stacker Prater (aka Paul E, father of both Bill John and Paulie) had a thing about old-time turkeys - specifically bronzebacks, the kind once found on grade school wall at Thanksgiving Time, with magnificent red wattles and tails that spread wide like an NBC peacock in the days before color television. 

New topic: Why Paulie and Bill never had a baby sister

Blame it on diapers. Mom swore our baby sister never came because of a lucrative job offer that kept her at work instead of the bedroom. I say it was the way you had to keep kids’ butts clean in the late 1940s, early ‘50s.