***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

…damn, and she was not given to damns, not with that pair of fire and brimstone parents ready to wash out her mouth with soap for every “damn” and “hell” uttered, but damn she wished that he had asked her to dance that last Saturday night. He had looked her way all night but never moved an inch in her direction. That last Saturday night dance before his number was called. The one at Red Ruffin’s barn, the weekly country dance over in Neola, Neola, Iowa if you were not sure of the location, although the story could just as easily have been told in Hullsville, Massachusetts, Olde Saco, Maine, Topeka, Kansas,  Springfield, Illinois or a million other towns and hamlets. Told just then when the world was enflamed with madmen trying to make guys from wheat-fields Iowa and places like that take their stuff, take it and like it. And so guys, shy, bashful guys like him, hands all calloused from hard days of work, guys who eyed girls like her at that dance but were stopped in the furtive glances stage had to take a number and tell those madmen night-takers a thing or too.

But where did that leave her, forlorn her, or Betty, or Sue, or Ida, or Rosa, or Maria, or Beulah, or a thousand other names, girls’ names, young women’s names. Left her to trek over to the General Store in Neola and check the daily causality lists and pray, pray like hell, that his precious name was not on there. And yes to make damn sure, hear that mother and father, damn sure that if he does make it back that he will get anything he wants from her even if she has to sneak into his bed some night …