Bill Clinton's Mother Ate Squirrel - and Liked It!

 

by Pa Rock

Reminiscer 

Jess Piper is a former high school English teacher who is running for state representative in northeast Missouri - House District #1 - and she is going to win it!  Yesterday Ms. Piper, who bills herself as a "rural progressive" and a "dirt road Democrat," and who has a strong presence on social media, posted the following tweet, a sentiment that set me spinning off down memory lane:

"There are things that shame poor folks and we learn not to talk about them.  One of mine was eating squirrel meat, and I announced it on a live podcast last night.  Idc anymore.  Folks like me exist and sometimes we run for office."

I loved that tweet (I've eaten squirrel myself!) and it took me back thirty years to when another political figure made the same admission - and it brought about a minor firestorm!

William Childress was born in dustbowl-ravaged rural Oklahoma in 1933 and grew up poor in the Midwest.  He served in the Korean War and after the war started a career in writing and journalism that spanned seven decades until his death in Nevada earlier this year.  At one time Childress wrote a regular column for the St. Louis Post Dispatch called "Out of the Ozarks," and he was an avid freelancer whose work was published over four thousand times in a wide array of national magazines and newspapers.

In the early 1990's Bill Childress lived for awhile in an apartment on Main Street in Anderson, (McDonald County) Missouri, a town that he occasionally called his home.  I was living just a few miles away in the town of Noel, and Bill and I had met a few years before when I had been one of the owners of a small startup newspaper in Southwest City, Missouri - also in McDonald County.

About that same time I was leaving the field of education and trying to survive by selling real estate - and I was also supplementing my income with several odd jobs, one of which was freelance journalism.  When a local newspaper, "The Neosho Daily News," found out that I knew Childress, they asked me to get an interview with the writer. It wasn't hard to do because Bill loved to talk - especially about himself.

Our meeting took place in late 1992, about the time that Bill Clinton had been elected President, and a lot of what we talked about was an interview that Childress had recently completed with Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley.  The interview had been done for a national ("women's") magazine, "Lady's Home Journal" or "Redbook," or something similar - I honestly can't remember.    Childress was all wound up because the editors had chopped a comment out of the article that he really wanted included.

The interview had been conducted at Kelley's home on Lake Hamilton near Hot Springs.  At some point while they were talking about Mrs. Kelley's upbringing in Arkansas, Childress said that a question suddenly popped into his mind and he asked Clinton's mother if she had ever eaten squirrel, and without hesitation the presidential mom shot back, "Yes, I have, and it's good!"

Childress submitted his article for publication, and for some reason the magazine sent it on to Clinton's staff for approval - and the Clintons wanted the line  about eating squirrel deleted.  The new administration was apparently trying to separate itself from the hillbilly imagery of coming out of Arkansas.

And Bill Childress, weeks later, was still furious that the magazine had allowed a politician to censor his work!

My other clear memory of that interview was Childress giving me pointers on how to make money freelancing - not an easy task.  He stressed the importance of getting as much mileage out of an article as possible.  As an example, he explained that he had used material from his interview with Virginia Kelley for articles in multiple publications.  Mrs. Kelley had worked as a nurse, and one of the markets that bought an article from Childress based on that interview was a nursing journal.  Bill Childress understood the business aspect of his craft.

But back to squirrels:  it's good to see that over the past thirty years politicians have finally become able to embrace the hardscrabble world from which they emerged, even if that humble history includes dining on the occasional squirrel!

And don't get me started on crawdads and frog legs!