"When is that weatherman
going to say 'unseasonably warm' weather?" Ivan wondered.
"Did you put the cat out?" Ivan said, "I didn't even know he was on fire."
"I guess I'll ask Mike Hughes if I can join the group Six Pack," Ivan said. "That way we could have a star-studded show. He could be the star and I could be the stud."
"Lyle Morgan showed up last Thursday morning at Paul's Cafe," Ivan said, "wearing either a rubber or plastic thumb stall on the thumb of his left hand. Now Morgan is one of the smartest guys I know. His I.Q. would rank right up there with anybody else in town. But with Morgan, when he tells you something, you have to separate fact from fiction, you have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and you always have to scrape the B.S. from around the edge of his stories to get to the kernel of truth. So here is what he said about his thumb. He said he was loading cattle. One of them wouldn't do what it was supposed to do. So Morgan done something, kicked it or done something to make it upset. So it got his thumb in its mouth and bit. Now that's his story and he stuck to it through several interrogations by some expert interrogators."
"The meek don't want it," Ivan said.
"I overheard a conversation about cold weather," Ivan said. "How cold it had been, how long it had been since some of the older people had gotten out to do any shopping. Nolan Hajny topped all the staying-in stories I heard. Someone asked him if his wife, Lorna, had made out a grocery shopping list to take to the store. Noland said she had, and it took a full roll of toilet paper for her grocery list. Now, I'm tellin' ya those people had been scraping the bottom of the grocery barrel at their house. Sounded to me like they were eating left over left overs."
"Somebody told me the other day not to 'rush off,'" Ivan said. "Boy, I just wish I could 'rush off.'"
"Someone said we had had snow on the ground since Thanksgiving," Ivan reported. "It had to be somebody young to remember that, because us old people can remember the Smith Center-Osborne football being played on a snowy field on Thanksgiving of 1932, but we can't remember what happened last week."
"Stan Hooper says that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, he is moving to Australia," Ivan reported. "That kind of statement could cause Hillary to carry Smith County."
"In 1930," Ivan said, "the candidates for Kansas governor were: for the Republicans Frank 'Chief' Haucke of Council Grove; and for the Democrats, Harry Woodring, a banker from Neodesha. And it would probably have been a rather dull election, until Dr. John R. Brinkley became a third candidate. Dr. Brinkley came to Kansas in 1918. He opened a medical clinic in Milford. In 1922 he started the first radio station in Kansas. The call letters were KFKB, Kansas First Kansas Best. At his medical clinic he offered to restore male sexual prowess by transplanting goat glands. He became a third party candidate for governor as a write-in candidate. It has long been suspected that he received enough write-in votes to win the governorship, but the Republicans and Democrats had enough clout to make the election boards throw out ballots on any technicality. The name had to be spelled exactly right, the I's dotted or any other technicality that could be found. Much to both the Democrats' and Republicans' relief, Harry Woodring was elected governor."
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