LIFE--TAIN'T NAWTHIN' but WIND

About the Book

Growing up Country in the fifties, and dancing to a different drummer, life is sometimes more fun than the law allows.  Rather than give up, Beauleiu, Bo Rogers keeps on trying to do whats right--but the mess gets messier.  Bo always tries to do what is right, well, almost always--sometimes hes led astray.  His view of life is not just different its uniquely his own.

1959 is turning on Bo in spite of everything he can think of to domachines wont work the way that he thinks they shouldhis Daddys usually docile tractor gets away from Bo, does a poor imitation of a circus elephant and rears up and hugs a tree with its front wheels six feet off the ground and the plows dug in.

On the way to the Duquoin State Fair, Bos prize Hampshire hog tries to desert from the back of the pickup truck in the middle of a bad curve.  Fast and fancy driving and a large amount of luck keeps the hog in, and the truck shinny side up.  The first night at the fair, the 4-H sponsor, Papa Dick, has a dump and run job pulled on himsomebody poured ten gallons of water through the window onto his bed.  At three in the morning the perpetrator, a boy named, John, goes in skinny-dipping.  Papa Dick runs him down in the nude like a rooster catching a bug and leads him about with a bailing twine leash tied around the family jools.      

Bo is surrounded by a Greyhound load of tourists as he tries to change clothes in the cab of his pickup.  He has to sit there with the jeans hes trying to put on draped across his lap as fifty looky-loos stream around both sides of the truck.

A farm boy from a one-room, all eight grades, country-school doesnt fit into the self- presumed sophistication of the small Illinois town of Anna.  Sports--well, team sports, are the right stuff from which heroes are carved.  Bo has the athletic prowess, but the family farm consumes far too much of his time for him to be a hero.

A fishing trip in a frog-strangling downpour nets a beaver and two very crabby bachelor fish.  Bo saves his partners life.

His friends are the unforgiven like himselfnon-participants in socially acceptable athletics.  These country boys do their bonding while hunting, fishing and driving like bats with their tail feathers on fire along the winding country roads.  Bo becomes the one to beat, but he is beaten by a stranger with cold, metallic-blue eyes.

A fishing trip turns into a first in American history--Bos best friend sinks a boat on the Mississippi with a slingshot.  Another fishing trip produces a mysterythe mystery of a brand new, partially built outhouse, and its psychological repercussions on the first man to use it.

The hunters have high hopes because of the hundred-dollar-guaranteed-coonhound.  The trip nearly ends in tragedy.

Creativity will find an expression, and Bo captains the parliamentary procedure team to a state championship and sets a personal record for the most points ever scored in competition.  This is so outside the sports expectations, that the school tries to ignore the accomplishmentI mean it aint football or even track, what good is it?

Bo loses Meggan, the girl whos locker hes shared all year to a college man and tries to run himself to death in a cold rain, but death eludes him and he just winds up with a bad cold.

Bo announces that he plans to go to Goodman School of the Theatre in Chicago and become an Actor.  When the literature comes from Goodman he finds he cant afford the tuition.  Every time Bo thinks he has taken a step forward, life picks him up by the heels and shakes all the change out of his pockets one more time.  Bo just lays there long enough to get his breath then gets up with dignity one more time.

This book will find a readership with men and women who grew up on family farms and ranches--also those who drive for a living or work with machinery.  It will have them laughing becaus

About the Author

Joe Neil Steward was born on the coldest day of 1942—his dad’s car radiator froze. He grew up on a farm outside of Anna, Illinois, and attended a one-room country school for all eight grades. He attended high school in Anna—riding a horse to the highway to catch the school bus. In 1962 he represented Southern Illinois University at the National Drama Festival at Laurence, Kansas, and won best actor. He was a theatre trained actor for twenty years and retired from acting after a disfiguring accident and drove a charter coach as a ski shuttle between the Town of Whitefish, Montana and the Big Mountain ski resort. He has recently moved to the Knoxville, TN area to take advantage of programs at the University of Tennessee.