An audio story which includes original, period-specific music performed by: The Howlin’ Wolf, Vernon Dalhart, and Billy Murray

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An elderly college professor contemplates the nature of evil after he finds an old photograph proving that his own father had been an instrumental participant in the lynching of Leo M. Frank, one of Georgia’s most notorious vigilante murders.   FICTION.

An original audio story for Appaloosa Radio

Coughlin, California has only had one murder. Bernard Winslow Schlafer (the Third) was a scion of one of the Central Valley’s richest and most important families. Yet, when the time came for him to assume responsibilities in the family businesses, he left Coughlin for Los Angeles where he eventually produced a sleazy reality game show entitled, “Seduction!”

Barnie S. (as he now prefers to be known) returned to his hometown to seek additional funding from his maternal grandmother for his television endeavor. On his way back to LA, he stops for gas and lottery tickets at the Log Cabin Liquor and Gas. While he is filling his car, a white sedan enters the parking lot. A man emerges and shoots Barnie S. with an AR-15.

The assassination took less than five seconds.

When things were going well, when the computer code poured itself freely into its allocated slots, when the iterations, runs and routines worked to perfection, when all the bugs and jinks had been banished. That’s when he took off his shoes, his socks and his shirt and wrote code au natural. He told his colleague and life-long friend, Mike, that when his feet felt the “reality” of the surfaces of the floor, it stimulated the neurons in his brain, made things clearer, opened options that he had not seen before.

In the early 1980s, computer programming was still an activity of white shirts, Snap-On ties, and pocket protectors full of a miscellany of pens.

That was not Rick. It may have been him once, back when he worked in the Department of Defence, running massive IBM behemoths, but it certainly was not him now. Now, he was running his own operation, creating computer schools for kids.

The best idea that he ever had. Creating computer schools for kids! The market was unlimited. The work was straight-forward. Taking computer lessons from a book (that he had written) to a computer-assisted teaching design. Simple code. Nothing that complex.

At a quarter to nine in the evening, Rick decided to turn off the systems. He pulled on his socks and his custom cowboy boots which had been made for him during a trip to Spain. He buttoned his blue-gray silk shirt that he had found in Milan. And, in spite of the muggy, South Carolina heat, he put on his black leather jacket, the one he had discovered in Montreal.

He walked down the open stairwell, then across the parking lot, and over a couple of short blocks to the Ramada Inn hotel where a live band was playing in the Lounge. The Friday night customers were filling all the small round tables around the parquet dance floor. A lot more action than three nights earlier.

Percival was ten-years older than Beck and worked a couple of stations over from him. Like Beck, Percival was an avid baseball fan, but he loved the Dodgers even more than Beck loved the hapless Pirates. Beck asked Woody to also create a player for Percival. Woody was more than happy to do so.

Beck and Percival worked side-by-side in their parallel baseball worlds, not really caring about the larger corporate world around them. Because the Dodgers won far more games than the Pirates, Percival lived in a happier world than Beck.

 Finally, after four losing seasons in a row, Beck complained to Woody over a beer that he would give a million dollars to experience a winning season. Of course, Beck did not have a million dollars and Woody knew that. But Beck’s complaint got Woody to thinking. Then, one evening in his small computer repair shop, Woody had an idea. “I’ll bet that lots of guys would pay to experience a winning season. Instead of sending them wireless broadcasts of live games, why not write a program, so that what they’ll hear is always a winning team.”

 It took a couple of weeks and some exasperation, but Woody completed his always a winner player prototype.

 But it was more than baseball . . . .

“Ladies and gentlemen. The International Association for Mathematics announces its Lifetime Achievement Award to a gifted mathematician whose work has revolutionized nearly every branch of contemporary mathematics. When I say “W. H. N. Goldman” you know I speak of virtuosity, of original thought, of insightful breakthrough logic. When I say “W. H. N. Goldman” you know I speak of one of the modern pioneers of our discipline, a thinker without whom we would not be able to do contemporary mathematics. When I say “W. H. N. Goldman” you know I speak of an individual of extraordinary brilliance. A mind of unlimited capacity. A master mathematician.

We are pleased this evening that Dr. Goldman is joining us for a talk.”

A tall woman wearing a pure white sarong and with extremely long gray hair trailing below her waist comes to the platform and accepts the microphone from the host. Her voice is both confident and clear.

“Good evening. I am Helen Goldman. I know that none of you have ever met me. I have lived for the past 47 years in my desert cocoon, entirely avoiding all human contact. I am here tonight to share my story. After that, I’ll return to my place of shelter and solitude. To my desert. To my simplicity, my frugality. To doing mathematics.

Every time he wore it, he thought it had a strange odor. It had been dry cleaned multiple times and no one else noticed any sort of odor. In fact, his wife, Wilma thought he looked “spiffy” in it and loved to see him in the double-breasted, brown suit with the faintest of gray pinstripes. “He looks like a movie star,” she proudly told her sister Grace Lynn. Far better in that suit than in the greasy dungaree overalls that he wore most of the time. But truck mechanics don’t wear suits to work in. They work in greasy overalls. The brown suit was for Sunday church and extra special occasions, like when they had gone to the casino and had a steak dinner for their tenth anniversary.

For their anniversary dinner, Wilma had worn a Kelly-green dress with lots of sparkles that matched the brown suit perfectly. She had even insisted that he pay the $5 to get a special color photograph of them together in their finery.

Harlan Royce was a big-chested man and a double-breasted suit looked best on him. A single-breasted suit would make him look bulgy; he would stick out in the wrong places. But, in a double-breasted suit and with a wider, patterned tie, he looked, well, like a movie star!

Still, every time Harlan Royce wore the double-breasted suit, he noticed the smell. The one that no one else noticed.

Harlan Royce was 39 when his slightly older cousin, “Cooter”Royce died.

No one who knew both “Cooter” and Harlan was surprised that “Cooter” died flat broke and without suitable clothing for his own burial. No one would be surprised, either, that Harlan Royce paid for the suit that “Cooter” was buried in. Harlan was a hard-working truck mechanic who attended church and remained true to his wife. “Cooter” — well, not so.

A Nell Trustmon story of frogotten ghost towns of the American West.

In rural mining communities like Boyce, Colorado, the arrival of the “Alligator Man” created a community-wide celebration. How could any of the Lithuanian miners continue to work in the deep, hard rock silver mine when there was a real, live alligator in town?

Gotta see that!

Jim Mounts-Miller tells his personal story as one of the very last patients with the once devastating Bulbospinal Poliomyelitis  disease.

Bulbospinal Poliomyelitis  attacks both the brainstem, affecting breathing and swallowing, and the spinal chord, affecting both arms and legs.

Jim entered the hospital with Polio just three months before the release of the Salk Polio vaccines.

The Piano Man of Stingaree Gulch

Stingaree Gulch was Nevada’s original sin city. The “Gulch” was an infamous pleasure pavilion created, financed, and controlled by George “Tex” Rickard. Seeking someone who had been in the “Gulch” when it was booming, Nell places ads in several newspapers. George, the “Piano Man of Stingaree Gulch” responds. He tells her about “Tex” Rickard and his multiplicity of operations. George was also the timekeeper and bell man for Rickard’s 1910 “Fight of the Century.” To promote the fight (and to increase his profits), Rickard stoked the nation’s already raw racial tensions, billing the fight as a “return to honor for the white race.” Then, Rickard took all the anti-Johnson (“white men”) bets, knowing that his good friend Jack Johnson could easily beat the now-retired and out-of-shape (white hope) Jim Jeffries.

A compelling story told in Nell’s usual “aw shucks” style.

A Nell Trustmon Short Story, taken from her magazine Broken Tree Tales

Nell retells the story of red-haired “Amanda” who may have been the first woman in the mining boomtown of Bonanza, Idaho. In the story, a poker player wagers his wife (“Amanda”) against his previous losses, but the gambler loses.

“Amanda” is won by a miner, but another steals her away. She escapes and seeks refuge with a third miner. Three miners each pointing their guns at each other!

While the story has humor, the real woman “Amanda” died in 1908 in the infirmary on the Challis County Poor Farm.

She was not yet 50.

Not yet 50.

Used up and discarded like many of the old boom towns themselves.

“Miss Julia” tells Nell’s version of the murder of Virginia City’s most famous prostitute, Julia Bulette. She looks behind the sensationalist press to find the real story and determines that the wrong man was probably hung for her murder.

Lying for Fun and Profit

In this light-hearted story, Nell Trustmon talks about the Sazerack Lying Club, an invention of newspaper editor Fred D. Hart. His 1878 book outsold all of Mark Twain’s.

“This purports to be a book on lies and lying, but it does not treat of the lies of politicians, stock-brokers, newspaper men, authors, and others, who lie for money; neither does it touch on the untruths of scandal, mischief, or malice, but only on those lies which amuse, instruct and elevate, without harm. It is a record of lies told in a club known as the Sazerac Lying Club, whose objects, as its name implies, are lying. A chapter is devoted to the rise, progress, and history of this club, interspersed with these lies. The book contains a number of sketches of odd characters in Nevada, and local narratives of life in Austin, written by the Author, and published from time to time in the columns of the AUSTIN REVEILLE, of which paper the writer has for several years been editor, and which have been clipped from the files of that journal, and made to do service in padding out this book to a sellable size.”

“In the days of the Father of this Country, if we are to believe a little tale about an adventure in connection with a particular cherry tree, lying was looked upon as wrong.

But that was before the time of the steam engine, the electric telegraph, daily newspapers, stocks and stock-brokers, and other modern improvements.

Today, to lie, and lie well, is meritorious, and besides, there’s money in it, which of itself is sufficient to make it commendable.”

~Newspaper editor – Fred D. Hart~

Austin, Nevada, 1878

Former Washoe County Undersheriff, Officer James H. Kinkead died June 9,1912. Among his papers and effects, Jim Kinkead’s family found a pencil-written manuscript telling about the robbery of the Overland Express Train # 1 on November 5, 1870, and about Kinkead’s role in apprehending the perpetrators.

Central Pacific’s Train No. 1, the “Overland Express,” carried bags of newly minted gold coins for the monthly payroll of the Yellow Jacket Mine. The train robbers believed that they were stealing a haul worth over $60,000.

Story by Joan Vannorsdall SchroederPublished in the May June 1997 issue of the Blue Ridge Country magazine,available online at blue-ridge-country.com/archive

Using original source material drawn from the Archives of Appalachia (housed at East Tennessee State University), Joan Vannorsdall Schroeder tells the story of Mary the Elephant who was hung for “murder” in the Clinchfield Railroad Yards in Erwin, Tennessee during September 1916.

Mary was the star of a two-bit traveling circus that toured the reconstruction-era South. Charlie Sparks, the owner of Sparks World Famous Shows, claimed that Mary the Elephant was “the largest living land animal on earth,” three inches bigger than Jumbo, P.T. Barnum’s famous pachyderm. At 30 years old, Mary was five tons of pure talent. She could “play 25 tunes on the musical horns without missing a note.” She was also the pitcher on the circus’ baseball-game gag routine.

Mary was Charlie Sparks’ favorite, his cash cow, his claim to circus fame. She was the leader of his small band of elephants, an exotic crowd-pleaser, an unpredictable giant.