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User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
Mark Cohen happy? - Sept 24 (Gamble Rogers medal) (11) RE: happy? - Sept 24 (Gamble Rogers medal) 25 Sep 05


Here's one I remember, from that website, about his friend Still Bill ("sorry is as sorry does":

Bill is a consummate expert in the field of bovine midwifery. Has to be a good cow midwife because every one of those newborn calves is money in the bank for an aggregarian entrepreneur like Bill. Bill had this old bossie cow, she was about to drop a calf. He heard her lowing out in the upper forty - that's the mud hole behind the chopping block - sounded like she was in hard labor. He got a piece of rope, ran out to help her, got around behind her, first thing he noticed it was a complicated birth because the calf had breached. He tried to turn the little fella around and get it coming out head first into the world the way mother nature intended but he had no success. He had no recourse then but to take hold of the calves hind legs and start in to pulling. That cow's tied to the tree lowing, Bill's pulling on that calves hind legs.

Now the interstate highway ran right behind the property at this point. Along comes this young woman with straight black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, driving a little MG with New Jersey plates, smoking a non-domestic tobacco. She looks down in the field and she sees Bill and the cow. She stops the car, she runs up there, she says "Sir, can I help you?" He says, "Yes ma'am, take hold of a leg and pull." They pulled and pulled and that calf came out into the world healthy and capered away. Bill said "Ma'am, I'm much obliged to you for helping me out in my time of need. Now is there any way in which I can recompense you for the services you have rendered her?" She said,'No sir, mister I wouldn't take a nickel for that. I just want to ask you one thing." He said, "what's that ma'am?" She said, "how fast was that little one going when it hit the big one?"

(I believe that if he had seen this story transcribed, Gamble would have made sure to correct "aggregarian" to "agrarian" and "breached" to "breeched"--a cow and a whale being two altogether different creatures.)

One thing those brief selections on the website don't give you is a sense of the magnificent tapestry of a Gamble Rogers story. He was not a joke teller, he was a storyteller. His narratives would roll like a mighty river, bending and meandering at times, but always carrying you along with the astonishing force and current of his words.

Aloha,
Mark


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