I found my Gamble Rogers tape and transcribed “War Bunny.” It doesn’t do him justice. His voice and how he tells the story really add a lot to it. Since he is no longer with us, I feel that we can keep the spirit of his expert story telling alive by sharing this. I don’t think he would mind!

I recall vividly the first time I heard this. I had just purchased the tape and was driving home listening to it. How I kept the truck between the lines in spite of my hysteric laughter is still a mystery!

* * *

I’ll never forget the time Still Bill came home. He had no sooner parked his pickup truck down by the garage than he became aware of the most incredible spate of keening and wailing billowing forth from his upstairs bathroom window and he recognized the harsh and assiduous tones of his good wife, War Bunny. It seemed as if she had been overwhelmed with dire exigency. He ran up the stairs and as he ran, he visualized her plight. He had not expected her back so soon and he had taken advantage of her absence to perform some tasks of home repair, specifically the re-enameling of the toilet seat. He knocked on the door and said, “Honey, it’s me, Bill. Are ya all right?”

She said, “You idiot! I’m stuck.”

He tried the door and it was locked. He said, “Let me in and I’ll help you.”

She said, “I can’t get to the door, you fool! I’m stuck.”

The door was indeed made fast against untimely intrusion, as War Bunny was well known in these pastoral environs as a righteous woman. Bill went out to the tool shed and gathered the tools necessary for the extrication of his spouse. A putty knife, a can of wheel-bearing grease, a crowbar, and a socket-wrench set in the event he had to dismantle the accommodation. He ran the ladder up the side, and chinned himself up over the sill. His worst fears were confirmed, for here he encountered his worthy spouse, mad as a boiled owl. He said, “Honey, I’ll have you out of this in no time at all.”

He took a big dollop of the wheel-bearing grease, applied it, and broke out the crow bar to no good advantage. He had no recourse then but to dismantle the accommodation. He bent to his task with a socket wrench set and in no time at all he had her loose. Now, good people, you have got to visualize this with me: War Bunny came up just a bit rubber-legged. She had been seated seven and a half hours. She never really stood straight up. She was in a jackknifed attitude because the seat came up with her. She was hardly ambulatory. Bill had to carry her down the stairs, across the yard, and try as he might, he could not get her into the cab of the pickup truck in that attitude. He had to take her around back and set her up on her hands and knees in the bed of the truck. Then he went around front, got in, fired her up, just took off right down through the middle of Snipe’s Ford. He pulled up in front of the doctor’s office, carried her up the walk, through the waiting room, into the operating room, and set her up on the operating table. Well, the old Doc came out and made about three complete circles. Bill said “Well, Doc, you ever seen anything like that before?”

Doc said, “Why yes, Bill, but never with a frame around it!”

[Punctuation fixed, and paragraph breaks added by JoeClone 05-Feb-2001.]