That's Judsonia

W. E. Orr published "That's Judsonia" in 1957. Some 600 to 700 copies were printed. My grandmother gave a copy to my dad in 1958. He was around 35 years old; I was around 3. Tucked inside the book are three yellowed newspaper clippings. One identifies the newspaper and date from which it was taken; one has my dad's handwritten annotation that it was from September 1977; one is undated. I believe that all three came from the White County Record.

The first is a picture of a steamboat on the Little Red River [click picture for a larger version].

judsonia.3

Jimmy Gill, and his brother W. W. "Doc" Gill lived across the street from my grandmother's house. Jimmy framed pictures, Doc was a dentist. One summer, very long ago, my dad and I were outside the house when Doc — a very old man at the time — came shuffling up the sidewalk. Dad asked, "Why don't you let Doc look at your loose tooth?" Of course I didn't want him too. But dad and Doc convinced me to open my mouth and, before I could react, Doc snaked his gnarly old forefinger into my mouth and the tooth was out. That should have been the beginning of a deep-seated mistrust of doctors, but my dad and Doc knew what they were doing. The tooth was out and the extraction didn't hurt. But how times have changed. Today an ungloved hand wouldn't go near a patients mouth.

The
second article features Orr's reflections on his book. The third article recounts a Yankee gunboat on the Red River during the war of Northern aggression. The links go to digitized versions of the articles; the page titles link to the scan of the article.


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