The Turner Diaries

Link to “jewspaper daze” of course featured on my idiot lying blog.

http://rturner229.blogspot.com/2009/…d-on-this.html

A link to Amazon.com’s page for my new book, Newspaper Days can be found on the right-hand side, as well as links to the pages for my previous books, The Turner Report, Devil’s Messenger, and Small Town News.

Smug goofy gliberal whigger faggot, ain’t I?

Growin’ Up in Granby

YOU DON’T really have a say in where you live. It is predestined. Some people get Malibu, Taos, or Aspen; I get Granby, a tiny farm town in the southwest Missouri Ozarks.

My parents grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, in little places that don’t even warrant dots on a map, places with deserted main streets and town squares, old bandstands and courthouses, and very little hope.

My family has hope. And that’s what makes it all so very hard.

My mom, Geraldine (“Geri,” for short), grew up in Granby with my grandparents, Viola and Wilbur “Web” Shipman, and my aunt Peggy. My dad, Ted, grew up in Neosho, the county seat, about eight miles from Granby, with my other grandparents, Fred and Madge, and my aunt Marilyn and uncle Roy.

Everything in Granby is white or off-white—the people, the cars, the clothes, the houses. It is like the black-and-white opening of The Wizard of Oz. When you finally see color, it’s overwhelming.

Even the food in Granby is white or off-white. When I go to dinner at friends’ houses, they eat only gray-looking meat alongside a potato. They snack on potato chips and vanilla ice cream. They drink milk or beer. “We don’t like any food with color,” a friend’s mom said to me once, when I asked if there were vegetables. “They’re weird.”

And so am I. I like to wear starched pink oxfords, sweater vests, and shoes with buckles. I do not like to get my hands dirty. I did not wipe my own butt until I was in junior high.

There is not much to Granby, Missouri, a town where trailers outnumber homes and teeth. There is one gas station; one lonely, dirty little grocery store; a post office; and one restaurant—Rita’s—which rotates its “fried buffet” daily. That’s how Rita’s publicizes it: “fried buffet.” The food is deep-fried and all-you-can-eat; people wobble in—literally wobble—and eat until the steaming silver bins are empty. Monday night at Rita’s is fried chicken with mashed potatoes and cream gravy; corn with mountains of butter that slowly melt until the kernels are actually floating; green-bean casserole; and apple pie, crisp, cobbler, and ice cream. Tuesday is fried fish and hush puppies. Wednesday is fried frog legs and french fries. Thursday is breakfast-all-day (fried eggs and hash browns), and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday repeat with the chicken, fish, and frog legs. There is, of course, a salad bar, but it contains only iceberg lettuce and four dressings: ranch, Thousand Island, bleu cheese, and creamy Italian; the rest is mayonnaise-laden “salads”—macaroni and potato—sitting next to bacon bits and chopped-up ham. My family eats at Rita’s two or three times a week and always shows up for the Sunday buffet during the school year. I try to avoid the buffet—any buffet—but it is impossible in the Ozarks. When I ask for oatmeal, I am told that “oat” isn’t a “meal.”

Granby doesn’t even have a stoplight—just a flashing light in the middle of town whose only purpose is seemingly to highlight the town’s two deserted main streets. The town is so quiet that when you drive by with your windows down, day or night, you can actually hear the blinking light blink—the click, click, click of the yellow.

Granby does, however, have its own language. For instance, the word “nary,” found only once in Webster’s, actually has three distinct meanings in Granby: nary as adjective meaning “narrow” (That’s a nary bridge, or Don’t be nary-minded); nary as contraction meaning “isn’t” (Nary a motel in town); or nary as a noun meaning “contrarian” (Don’t be a nary).

Granby’s claim to fame is trumpeted proudly on its lone water tower: THE OLDEST MINING TOWN IN THE SOUTHWEST. How true that is, I never know. Granby had been—for the briefest of periods—a buzzing ore-mining town. The town had swelled to about 5,000 people at its height. There were dance halls, bars, places to eat, and more bars. Men swarmed for the work, and women followed. One of those men was my mom’s dad, Grampa Shipman.

The beauty of Granby, or of any small town, is its simplicity, its absolute nothingness, where you’re free to concentrate on nature.